There are a lot of things to envy about youth: clear skin, perfect hair, boundless energy. But nothing says young like a good set of telomeres. We’ve all got them, but if you’re past a certain age, you don’t want to think about them too much.
Telomeres are the protein caps at the end of chromosomes that act as a sort of mortal fuse: the older you get the shorter they grow, a process that contributes to all manner of age-related diseases and breakdowns. Telomere length can be affected by things other than merely the number of years you’ve been around, including environmental toxins and stress and whether or not you exercise and meditate. Now, a paper published in PNAS Plus takes the impact of stress a worrisome step further: According to a study of 4,598 people, adverse experiences in childhood can hasten the telomere burn-down, leading to premature aging of cells—and of the body as a whole.
The study—a collaboration between researchers in the U.S. and Canada, led by kinesiologist Eli Puterman of the University of British Columbia—drew its sample group from the 26,000 people already participating in the U.S. Health and Retirement Study (HRS), a bi-annual health survey of adults over 50 that began in 1992. For the telomere work, the volunteers were chosen from across an age, gender and overall health spectrum, with multiple other factors including education, weight and smoking history also factored in. Saliva swabs were collected from all of the volunteers and telomere length was measured using polymerase chain reaction (PCR).
That was the easy part.
[For more of this story, written by Jeffrey Kluger, go to http://time.com/4516605/telomeres-aging-childhood/]
Comments (1)