HEALTHY LIFE STYLE MAY BUFFER AGAINST STRESS RELATED CELL AGING
A new study from UC
San Francisco is the first to show that while the impact of life's stressors
accumulate overtime and accelerate cellular aging, these negative effects may
be reduced by maintaining a healthy diet, exercising and sleeping well.
The study participants
who exercised, slept well and ate well had less telomere shortening than the
ones who didn't maintain healthy lifestyles, even when they had similar levels
of stress," said lead author Eli Puterman, PhD, assistant professor in the
department of psychiatry at UCSF. "It's very important that we promote
healthy living, especially under circumstances of typical experiences of life
stressors like death, caregiving and job loss."
The paper will be
published in Molecular Psychiatry, a peer-reviewed science journal
by Nature Publishing Group.
Telomeres are the
protective caps at the ends of chromosomes that affect how quickly cells age.
They are combinations of DNA and proteins that protect the ends of chromosomes
and help them remain stable. As they become shorter, and as their structural
integrity weakens, the cells age and die quicker. Telomeres also get shorter
with age.
In the study,
researchers examined three healthy behaviors -physical activity, dietary intake
and sleep quality -- over the course of one year in 239 post-menopausal,
non-smoking women. The women provided blood samples at the beginning and end of
the year for telomere measurement and reported on stressful events that
occurred during those 12 months. In women who engaged in lower levels of
healthy behaviors, there was a significantly greater decline in telomere length
in their immune cells for every major life stressor that occurred during the
year. Yet women who maintained active lifestyles, healthy diets, and good
quality sleep appeared protected when exposed to stress -- accumulated life
stressors did not appear to lead to greater shortening.
"This is the
first study that supports the idea, at least observationally, that stressful
events can accelerate immune cell aging in adults, even in the short period of
one year. Exciting, though, is that these results further suggest that keeping
active, and eating and sleeping well during periods of high stress are
particularly important to attenuate the accelerated aging of our immune
cells," said Puterman.
In recent years,
shorter telomeres have become associated with a broad range of aging-related
diseases, including stroke, vascular dementia, cardiovascular disease, obesity,
osteoporosis diabetes, and many forms of cancer.
Research on telomeres,
and the enzyme that 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
results are exciting yet observational at this point. They do provide the
impetus to move forward with interventions to modify lifestyle in those
experiencing a lot of stress, to test whether telomere attrition can truly be
slowed," said Blackburn.
Co-authors include
senior author Elissa Epel, PhD, department of psychiatry, Jue Lin, PhD,
department of biochemistry and biophysics, both of UCSF and Jeffrey Krauss, MD,
division of physical medicine and rehabilitation at Stanford University. Lin,
Epel and Blackburn are the co-founders of Telome Health Inc., a diagnostic
company measuring telomere biology.
The study was
supported by the Baumann Foundation and the Barney & Barbro Foundation.
Puterman is supported by the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute of the
National Institutes of Health.
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