Many psychiatric disorders have been associated with increased risk of mortality and various aging-related somatic diseases. In addition to unhealthy lifestyles, also various stress-related physiological processes likely play a role in explaining these detrimental health consequences of psychiatric disorders. The impact could be visible at the cellular level, with psychiatric patients presenting more signals of physiological aging for instance as determined by measuring telomere length. In this talk we will first highlight the current state-of-the art evidence that various psychiatric conditions, including e.g. depression, anxiety and PTSD, are associated with shorter telomere length. Second, we will provide results from the Netherlands Study of depression and anxiety (n = 2981) that tested longitudinal associations using 6 year data on psychiatric status and telomere length. These results indicate that the association between depressive and anxiety disorders with telomere length is stable over time, and doesn’t show many dynamic associations. Finally, in the same study we have also tested to what extent lifestyle and dysregulations of physiological stress systems such as the immune, HPA-axis and autonomic nervous systems are partly responsible for the observed shorter telomere length in depressed or anxious patients. Results indicate that especially smoking behavior and systemic inflammation partly contribute to the shorter telomere length, but can’t completely explain found associations.

In sum, this talk will highlight the current state-of-evidence for an association between various psychiatric conditions with shorter telomere length, and will provide insights into its dynamics and its contributing mechanisms.