Healthy Lifestyle Retards Cells Aging

http://personal-longevity.com/2014/08/11/healthy-lifestyle-retards-cells-aging
Healthy Lifestyle Retards Cells Aging
Posted by Martin Ettington on August 11, 2014 | comments


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By Rick Nauert PhD Senior News Editor
Reviewed by John M. Grohol, Psy.D. on July 30, 2014
New research provides evidence that while the impact of life’s stressors accumulate overtime and accelerate cellular aging, a healthy lifestyle may counteract many of these effects.
In the new study, University of California, San Francisco researchers discovered maintaining a healthy diet, exercising, and sleeping well reduced the negative effects of life stress.
“The study participants who exercised, slept well, and ate well had less telomere shortening than the types who didn’t maintain healthy life, even when they had similar levels of stress,” said direct writer Eli Puterman, Ph.D.
“It’s very important that we promote healthy residing, especially under circumstances of typical experiences of life stressors like death, caregiving, and job reduction.”
The paper will be published in the journal Molecular Psychiatry.
Telomeres are the protective caps at the ends of chromosomes that affect how quickly cells age. They are mixtures of DNA and proteins that protect the ends of chromosomes and help them remain steady.
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 3 healthy behaviors — bodily action, dietary consumption, and sleep quality — over the course of one year in 239 post-menopausal, non-smoking women.
The women provided blood samples at the starting and end of the year for telomere measurement and reported on stressful events that transpired during those 12 months.
In women who engaged in lower levels of healthy behaviors, there was a significantly greater decrease in telomere size in their immune cells for every major life stressor that transpired during the year.
Yet women who maintained energetic life, healthy diets, and good quality sleep appeared protected when exposed to stress — accumulated life stressors did not appear to direct to greater shortening.
“This is the first study that supports the idea, at minimum observationally, that stressful events can accelerate immune cell aging in adults, even in the short period of one year.”
Researchers were excited to find that during tines of high stress, keeping energetic, eating, and sleeping well attenuated the accelerated aging of our immune cells.
In recent years, shorter telomeres have become associated with a broad range of aging-related diseases, including stroke, vascular dementia, cardiovascular disease, weight problems, osteoporosis diabetes, and many forms of cancer.
Research on telomeres, and the enzyme that makes them, telomerase, was pioneered by 3 Americans, including University of California, San Francisco molecular biologist and co-writer Elizabeth Blackburn, Ph.D. Blackburn co-discovered the telomerase enzyme in 1985.
The researchers received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medication 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.