title: Chronic infection. Hidden costs of infection: chronic malaria accelerates telomere degradation and senescence in wild birds.
abstract: Recovery from infection is not always complete, and mild chronic infection may persist. Although the direct costs of such infections are apparently small, the potential for any long-term effects on Darwinian fitness is poorly understood. In a wild population of great reed warblers, we found that low-level chronic malaria infection reduced life span as well as the lifetime number and quality of offspring. These delayed fitness effects of malaria appear to be mediated by telomere degradation, a result supported by controlled infection experiments on birds in captivity. The results of this study imply that chronic infection may be causing a series of small adverse effects that accumulate and eventually impair phenotypic quality and Darwinian fitness.
authors.affiliation: Department of Biology, Lund University, Ecology Building, 223 62 Lund, Sweden. Infectious Disease Unit, Department of Medicine Solna, Karolinska Institute, 17176 Stockholm, Sweden.
authors.forename: M
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Asghar
authors.affiliation: Department of Biology, Lund University, Ecology Building, 223 62 Lund, Sweden. dennis.hasselquist@biol.lu.se.
authors.forename: D
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Hasselquist
authors.affiliation: Department of Biology, Lund University, Ecology Building, 223 62 Lund, Sweden.
authors.forename: B
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Hansson
authors.affiliation: Institute of Biodiversity and Ecosystem Research, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, 2 Gagarin Street, 1113 Sofia, Bulgaria.
authors.forename: P
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Zehtindjiev
authors.affiliation: Department of Biology, Lund University, Ecology Building, 223 62 Lund, Sweden.
authors.forename: H
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Westerdahl
authors.affiliation: Department of Biology, Lund University, Ecology Building, 223 62 Lund, Sweden.
authors.forename: S
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Bensch
mesh_terms: D000375:Aging / Q000235:genetics*; D000818:Animals; D001947:Breeding; D056084:Genetic Fitness; D008288:Malaria / Q000235:genetics / Q000503:physiopathology / Q000662:veterinary*; D008289:Malaria, Avian / Q000235:genetics* / Q000503:physiopathology*; D010961:Plasmodium; D020308:Songbirds / Q000235:genetics / Q000469:parasitology* / Q000502:physiology; D059505:Telomere Homeostasis / Q000235:genetics*