A new study on UC San Francisco is the first to show that although the impact of life’s stressors accumulate overtime and accelerate cellular aging, these negative effects might be reduced by preserve a healthy diet, exercising and sleeping well.
“The research participants who exercised, slept well and ate well had less telomere shortening compared to ones who didn’t maintain healthy lifestyles, even when they’d similar levels of stress,” said lead author Eli Puterman, PhD, assistant professor in the department of psychiatry at UCSF. “It’s very important that people promote healthy living, especially under circumstances of typical experiences of life stressors like death, caregiving and job loss.”
The paper is going to be published in Molecular Psychiatry, a peer-reviewed science journal naturally Publishing Group.
Telomeres are the protective caps at the ends of chromosomes affecting how quickly cells age. They’re mixtures of DNA and proteins that protect the ends of chromosomes and help them remain stable. Because they become shorter, and as their structural integrity weakens, cells age and die quicker. Telomeres will also get shorter with age.
In the study, researchers examined three healthy behaviors Cphysical activity, dietary intake and sleep quality C during the period of twelve months in 239 post-menopausal, non-smoking women. The ladies provided blood samples at the start and end of the season for telomere measurement and reported on stressful events that occurred during those 12 months. In women who engaged in ‘abnormal’ amounts of healthy behaviors, there is a significantly greater decline in telomere length in their immune cells for every major life stressor that occurred in the past year. Yet ladies who maintained active lifestyles, healthy diets, and top quality sleep appeared protected when subjected to stress C accumulated life stressors did not seem to result in greater shortening.
“This is actually the first study that supports the idea, at least observationally, that stressful events can accelerate immune cell aging in grown-ups, even in rapid period of one year. Exciting, though, is that these results further suggest that keeping active, and eating and sleeping well in times of high stress are particularly important to attenuate the accelerated aging of our immune cells,” said Puterman.
In recent years, shorter telomeres have become of a wide range of aging-related diseases, including stroke, vascular dementia, cardiovascular disease, obesity, osteoporosis diabetes, and many types of cancer.
Research on telomeres, and the enzyme which makes them, telomerase, was pioneered by three Americans, including UCSF molecular biologist and co-author Elizabeth Blackburn, PhD. Blackburn co-discovered the telomerase enzyme in 1985. The scientists received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2009 for their work.
“These new answers are exciting yet observational at this point. They are doing provide the impetus to maneuver forward with interventions to change lifestyle in those experiencing a lot of stress, to check whether telomere attrition can truly be slowed,” said Blackburn.
