Sorry, Peter Pan. You can’t be Boy Scout-age forever. Your telomeres won’t have it. These caps on the ends of your DNA shrink as you get older and have been linked to the chronic diseases associated with aging.
The growing science of epigenetics — or how lifestyle and environment affect our genes — is providing new insight into the aging process and might hold the keys to slowing down the inevitable or even reversing it. At the center of this research? Telomeres.
Like the plastic caps on shoelaces that keep them from fraying, telomeres are protective caps on chromosome strands. Geneticists discovered that after DNA replicates a set number of times, the ends of telomeres shrink and deteriorate. When this happens, your DNA becomes exposed to cellular aging. In recent years, scientists have associated shortened telomeres with cardiovascular disease, obesity, diabetes, many types of cancer and osteoporosis — the entire spectrum of aging-related diseases.
[For more of this story, written by Jeff Csatari, go to https://scoutingmagazine.org/2...ght-bodys-telomeres/]
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