The assessment of telomere length was conducted by telomere FISH for telomeric DNA as previously described 18, 26. Sections were imaged by an Olympus BX51 fluorescence microscope equipped with a UIS2 optical system and Kohler illuminator (OLYMPUS, Tokyo, Japan) using a 40X/1.42 NA UPLFLN lens with correction collar. Quantification of the digitized fluorescent telomere captures was performed applying the open source JAVA‐based image analysis software package ImageJ as previously described 15. Details are reported in the supplementary material, Supplementary materials and methods.