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New personal record of desk rejects 🥳 I am taking a note of journals that take over a month for the desk 📖 It is also a unusual situation where pretty much everything has been already reviewed at eLife on our Neuro paper (click for open reviews), now the sample size is just substantially larger.

Lots of prior work has related longer telomeres to a host of positive lifestyle factors - with often the explicit hx that engaging in these behaviors will slow down biological aging (aka build a cognitive reserve).

As mentioned by others (Rentscher et al., AnnRev, 2020) the vast majority of this work isn't even longitudinal. It is just people cross-sectionally relating telomere length to [insert your favorite IV]. Our paper is (to my knowledge) the first natural experimental design on telomeres.

There is a serious lack of causal inference in psychology as a whole, which @pwgtennant.bsky.social & @dingdingpeng.the100.ci, among others, have been pointing at! journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

Using the largest sample of telomere length around (UK Biobank), we really find absolutely no effect from an additional year of education via a policy change. This mirrors our null finding for structural neuroimaging in Elife.

A similar effect happens for telomeres, yet 13 editors agreed it shouldn't get past the desk. Possibly it was seen as narrow in scope, yet education has one of the largest confounded effects with aging biomarkers. If this is happening for education... Mediterranean diets, etc watch out.

Super sorry this is turning out so hard to publish :( for what it's worth, I absolutely find this interesting despite not being heavily invested in anything related to telomeres 😂 But I guess in a sense your findings are bad news>