Dayana A. Delgado, Chenan Zhang, Kevin J. Gleason, Kathryn Demanelis et al.
Leukocyte telomere length (LTL) is a heritable trait with two potential sources of heritability (h2): inherited variation in non-telomeric regions (e.g., SNPs that influence telomere maintenance) and variability in the lengths of telomeres in gametes that produce offspring zygotes (i.e., “direct” in...
Yu-Hsuan Shih, Caitlin G. Howe, Molly Scannell Bryan, Hasan Shahriar et al.
Background: Hypertension in later life, a significant risk factor for cardiovascular disease, has been linked to elevated blood pressure in early life. Exposure to metals may influence childhood blood pressure; however, previous research is limited and has mainly focused on evaluating the toxicity o...
Farzana Jasmine, Ronald Rahaman, Shantanu Roy, Maruf Raza et al.
BACKGROUND: Formalin-fixed, paraffin-embedded (FFPE) samples are a highly desirable resource for epigenetic studies, but there is no suitable platform to assay genome-wide methylation in these widely available resources. Recently, Thirlwell et al. (2010) have reported a modified ligation-based DNA r...
Chenan Zhang, Muhammad G. Kibriya, Farzana Jasmine, Shantanu Roy et al.
Background: Chronic arsenic exposure is associated with increased risk for arsenical skin lesions, cancer, and other adverse health outcomes. One potential mechanism of arsenic toxicity is telomere dysfunction. However, prior epidemiological studies of arsenic exposure, telomere length (TL), and ski...
Brandon L. Pierce, Tong Lin, Samantha G. Dean, Maria Argos et al.
Inorganic arsenic (iAs) is a carcinogen, and exposure to iAs via food and water is a global public health problem. iAs-contaminated drinking water alone affects >100 million people worldwide, including ~50 million in Bangladesh. Once absorbed into the blood stream, most iAs is converted to mono-meth...
Fen Wu, Farzana Jasmine, Muhammad G. Kibriya, Mengling Liu et al.
Epidemiologic studies that evaluated genetic susceptibility to the effects of arsenic exposure from drinking water on subclinical atherosclerosis are limited. We conducted a cross-sectional study of 1,078 participants randomly selected from the Health Effects of Arsenic Longitudinal Study in Banglad...
Maria Argos, Tong Lin, Brandon L. Pierce, Muhammad Rakibuz‐Zaman et al.
BACKGROUND: The high prevalence of tobacco use in some developing nations, including Bangladesh, poses several public health challenges for these populations. Smoking behaviour is determined by genetic and environmental factors; however, the genetic determinants of smoking behaviour have not been pr...
Shohreh F. Farzan, HEM Mahbubul Eunus, Syed Emdadul Haque, Golam Sarwar et al.
Cardiovascular disease (CVD) is the leading cause of morbidity and mortality worldwide, with ~80% of CVD-related deaths occurring in low- and middle-income countries. Growing evidence suggests that chronic arsenic exposure may contribute to CVD through its effect on endothelial function in adults. H...
Farzana Jasmine, Zahidul Haq, Mohammed Kamal, Maruf Raza et al.
In colorectal cancer (CRC), the role of microsatellite instability (MSI) is well known. In a genome-wide scale, for the first time, we explored whether differential methylation is associated with MSI. We analyzed 250 paired samples from 125 CRC patients (m = 72, f = 53) at different stages. Of them,...
Muhammad G. Kibriya, Farzana Jasmine, Faruque Parvez, Maria Argos et al.
BACKGROUND: Exposure to arsenic in drinking water is a global health problem and arsenic-induced skin lesions are hallmark of chronic arsenic toxicity. We and others have reported germline genetic variations as risk factors for such skin lesions. The role of copy number variation (CNV) in the germli...
Jianjun Gao, Tong Lin, Maria Argos, Molly Scannell Bryan et al.
BACKGROUND: Consumption of arsenic-contaminated drinking water adversely affects health. There is interindividual variation in arsenic metabolism efficiency, partially due to genetic variation in the arsenic methyltransferase (AS3MT) gene region. OBJECTIVES: The goal of this study was to assess the ...
Molly Scannell Bryan, Maria Argos, Brandon L. Pierce, Tong Lin et al.
Many health outcomes are influenced by a person's body mass index, as well as by the trajectory of body mass index through a lifetime. Although previous research has established that body mass index related traits are influenced by genetics, the relationship between these traits and genetics has not...
Rick J. Jansen, Tong Lin, Maria Argos, Farzana Jasmine et al.
BACKGROUND: It is well-known that methylation changes occur as humans age, however, understanding how age-related changes in DNA methylation vary by sex is lacking. In this study, we characterize the effect of age on DNA methylation in a sex-specific manner and determine if these effects vary by gen...
Shohreh F. Farzan, Margaret R. Karagas, Jieying Jiang, Fen Wu et al.
Cardiovascular disease (CVD) is the leading cause of morbidity and mortality worldwide and mounting evidence indicates that toxicant exposures can profoundly impact on CVD risk. Epidemiologic studies have suggested that arsenic (As) exposure is positively related to increases in blood pressure (BP),...
Shohreh F. Farzan, Hasan Shahriar, Muhammad G. Kibriya, Farzana Jasmine et al.
BACKGROUND: Telomere length has been associated with the occurrence and progression of common chronic and age-related diseases, and in younger populations, may represent a biomarker of disease susceptibility. Early childhood is a critical period for telomere biology as this period is characterized b...
Muhammad G. Kibriya, Maruf Raza, Mohammed Kamal, Zahidul Haq et al.
We compared tumor and adjacent normal tissue samples from 165 colorectal carcinoma (CRC) patients to study change in relative telomere length (RTL) and its association with different histological and molecular features. To measure RTL, we used a Luminex-based assay. We observed shorter RTL in the CR...
Kathryn Demanelis, Dayana A. Delgado, Tong Lin, Farzana Jasmine et al.
BACKGROUND: Arsenic exposure increases the risk of several cancers in humans and contributes to genomic instability. Somatic loss of the Y chromosome (LoY) is a potential biomarker of genomic instability and cancer risk. Smoking is associated with LoY, but few other carcinogens have been investigate...
Samantha G. Dean, Chenan Zhang, Jianjun Gao, Shantanu Roy et al.
Telomeres are tandem repeat sequences at the end of chromosomes that bind proteins to protect chromosome ends. Telomeres shorten with age, and shorter leukocyte telomere length (TL) has been associated with overall mortality in numerous studies. However, this association has not been tested in popul...
Muhammad G. Kibriya, Farzana Jasmine, A. Muñoz, Tariqul Islam et al.
Exposure to inorganic arsenic (As) is recognized as risk factor for basal cell carcinoma (BCC). We have followed-up 7000 adults for 6 years who were exposed to As and had manifest As skin toxicity. Of them, 1.7% developed BCC (males = 2.2%, females = 1.3%). In this study, we compared transcriptome-w...
Muhammad G. Kibriya, Maruf Raza, Anthony E. Quinn, Mohammed Kamal et al.
There is an increase in the incidence of early onset colorectal carcinoma (EOCRC). To better understand if there is any difference in molecular pathogenesis of EOCRC and late onset colorectal carcinoma (LOCRC), we compared the clinical, histological, transcriptome, and methylome profile of paired CR...