Stress ages you

You will get older, we all will, that much is certain. What is less clear is how you will age and just how long you will spend gracing this mortal coil. These days “anti-ageing” is big business as we contemplate lifespans in excess of 100 years and possibly pushing 120 years or more by the middle of the 21st century. The length and quality of your life will be determined by many factors and one of those could be how much stress you experience.

The crux of this new Swedish research is the telomere, a part of the cellular material in all of us. The telomere is the outermost part of the chromosome, in scientific circles it is compared to an aglet, the stiff bit at the end of a shoelace that stops it from unravelling. Telomeres prevent chromosome ends from fraying and sticking to each other, which would scramble your genetic information to cause cancer, other diseases, or death.

Yet, each time a cell divides, the telomeres get shorter. When they get too short, the cell no longer can divide and becomes inactive or “senescent” or dies. So telomeres also have been compared with a bomb fuse.

Cells normally can divide only about 50 to 70 times, with telomeres getting progressively shorter until the cells become damaged or die. Telomeres do not shorten with age in tissues such as heart muscle in which cells do not continually divide.

Generally however, Cell division is needed so you can grow new skin, blood, bone and other cells when needed. Without telomeres, chromosome ends could fuse together leaving broken DNA which is dangerous as a cell has the ability to sense and repair chromosome damage. Without telomeres, the ends of chromosomes would look like broken DNA, and the cell would try to fix something that wasn’t broken. That also would make them stop dividing and eventually die.

While telomere shortening has been linked to the aging process, it is not yet agreed whether shorter telomeres are just a sign of ageing or actually contribute to ageing. Still, there is a lot of research going on into ways to preserve telomeres and also into what causes telomeres to shorten; which is where this latest research has come in.

Previous research has already shown that oxidation and inflammation accelerate telomere shortening. In this study of 550 people, patients with recurring depression were compared to “healthy” people. Telomere length was measured to see if something about depression might be affecting telomeres and therefore shortening life.

The results showed that among depressed people telomere length in white blood cells was significantly shorter than among the healthy group. The researchers also observed that depressed people tend to have disrupted control of cortisol, the stress hormone. It seems that cortisol might be shortening telomeres.

The inference is that depressed people tend to experience more stress, have higher cortisol levels, have shorter telomeres, and therefore are more likely to die from any cause. So at a cellular level, stress is ageing you.

The moral of course, is fairly simple: don’t stress about the small stuff and remember, it’s all small stuff.