Medicine and Health Sciences Commons^™

Validation Of Minimally-Invasive Sample Collection Methods For Measurement Of Telomere Length, Stephanie A. Stout, Jue Lin, Natalie Hernandez, Elysia Poggi Davis, Elizabeth Blackburn, Judith E. Carroll, Laura M. Glynn

Psychology: Faculty Scholarship

Objective: The discovery of telomere length (TL) as a biomarker of cellular aging and correlate of age-related disease has generated a new field of research in the biology of healthy aging. Although the most common method of sample collection for TL is venous blood draw, less-invasive DNA collection methods are becoming more widely used. However, how TL relates across tissues derived from these sample collection methods is poorly understood. The current study is the first to characterize the associations in TL across three sample collection methods: venous whole blood, finger prick dried blood spot and saliva.

Methods: TL …

Abnormal Dendritic Maturation Of Developing Cortical Neurons Exposed To Corticotropin Releasing Hormone (Crh): Insights Into Effects Of Prenatal Adversity?, Megan M. Curran, Curt A. Sandman, Elysia Poggi Davis, Laura M. Glynn, Tallie Z. Baram

Psychology: Faculty Scholarship

Corticotropin releasing hormone (CRH) produced by the hypothalamus initiates the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis, which regulates the body’s stress response. CRH levels typically are undetectable in human plasma, but during pregnancy the primate placenta synthesizes and releases large amounts of CRH into both maternal and fetal circulations. Notably, placental CRH synthesis increases in response to maternal stress signals. There is evidence that human fetal exposure to high concentrations of placental CRH is associated with behavioral consequences during infancy and into childhood, however the direct effects on of the peptide on the human brain are unknown. In this study, we used a …