SynthesisMolecular ecology2026
Parental Age Effects on Offspring Telomere Length Across Vertebrates: A Meta-Analysis.
Synthesis in Molecular ecology, 2026. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 2 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
2 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- Parental Age Effects on Offspring Telomere Length Across Vertebrates: A Meta-Analysis.Molecular ecology · 2026Pooled it
- Mothers Matter Most: Maternal, but Not Paternal, Age and Inbreeding Affect Nestling Telomere Length in a Wild Passerine.Molecular ecology · 2026Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
4 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Telomeres shorten with advancing age in numerous species, and shorter telomeres are linked to increased mortality risk. While parental age at conception can influence offspring telomere length, the magnitude and direction of this effect differ across studies, species, and parental sexes. To understand how parental age influences offspring telomere length across vertebrates, we conducted a systematic review and meta-analysis to examine the effects of paternal and maternal age at conception on offspring telomere length, incorporating 99 effect sizes from 30 human studies and 49 effect sizes from 12 non-human vertebrate studies. There was a positive overall parental age effect on offspring telomere length within human studies, while no effect was found in non-human vertebrate studies after adjusting for study, estimate, and phylogenetic effects. Considerable heterogeneity was attributed mainly to between-study variance in human studies and to phylogeny in non-human studies. Parental age effect estimates were correlated with the laboratory methods used for measuring telomere length in all studies. In human studies, the interaction between parental and offspring sex affected the parental age effect estimates, and estimates derived from leukocytes were less positive than those from other cells. In non-human vertebrates, parental age effects were less negative when the parents' identity was controlled for in the study. Publication biases suggest overestimation of the parental age effect in human studies. We recommend that future research be conducted on a broader range of taxa, test for within-parent effects, and follow standardised reporting practices to enhance data comparability.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What Socratic holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the Socratic graph.