We have observed a correlation between shorter telomere length at adult age and the reported number of childhood adverse life events in a subsample of an epidemiological cohort consisting of anxiety disorder patients and matched controls. Interestingly, this finding was not dependent on the anxiety disorder status, Songorine although anxiety disorder patients had a larger number of childhood adversities compared to the controls. The most significantly associated single adversity was childhood chronic or severe illness which may affect cellular ageing through yet unknown direct physiological and indirect psychological mechanisms. The reported childhood adversities may represent a lifelong course of stress factors, partly traumatic in CVT-10216 origin and later complicated by temporally secondary mental disorders. Our results can be considered as a partial replication of a recently published study in which childhood maltreatment was associated with shorter telomere length at the adult age in 31 individuals with no psychiatric disorders, although different measures of childhood adversity was used. Our sample derives from the nationwide Health 2000 Study which was carried out to assess welfare of Finnish people and which represents the entire population over 30 years of age. Therefore, we were able to control for a large number of possible confounders, which is typically not possible in a clinic-based setting. Smoking decreased telomere length while the duration of sleep correlated positively with it. The adjustment of telomere length by these two factors decreased the b-value of the number of adverse life events by about one third, suggesting that this proportion of the effect may be explained by these two life-style factors. Smoking has been shown to affect telomere length in numerous studies e.g., but duration of sleep has not, although some earlier studies did adjust telomere length by sleep duration. Interestingly, sum score of GHQ, which measures recent psychological distress, correlated significantly with the anxiety disorder status, but did not have an effect on telomere length. Several studies have observed a correlation of shorter telomere length with current psychological stress or more chronic stress, although a negative report exists as well. So far, our study is the only population-based cohort to investigate the effect of current psychological stress with telomere length, and the instruments to measure stress have varied across studies.