Think of your body like an automobile. Both require regular maintenance, periodic repairs, and safe handling. Both inevitably wear down — and much earlier when they’re subject to excessive strain and lax care.
And like a rusted undercarriage or a dying battery, the physical signs of decay are often unseen, lurking at a microscopic level.
Over the last 2 decades, scientists have been uncovering startling findings about the cellular signs of premature aging and health risks. And psychology researchers have played a vital role in those investigations, linking this kind of cellular deterioration to chronic stress — the strain that accompanies long-standing unemployment, physical abuse, the death of a family member, and many other life adversities.
The focus of this work involves telomeres, the protective caps on the ends of chromosomes that protect our genetic data. Over time, as telomeres become shorter, cells age and die — a fate known as senescence. Studies have tied shorter telomeres to a wide range of aging-related diseases, including dementia, osteoporosis, diabetes, stroke, cardiovascular disease, and some cancers.
“This marker turns out to be one of the strongest predictors of early diseases of aging and in many studies of early mortality,” APS Fellow Elissa S. Epel of the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), a leader in this line of research, said during a presentation in May at the 2014 APS Annual Convention. “So it not only predicts the life of the cell, but it also predicts the health span of humans when they get diseases of aging.”
[For more of this story, written by Scott Sleek, go to http://www.psychologicalscienc...the-short-of-it.html]
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