Is accelerated aging a result of depression?
Depression can accelerate the aging process in humans
Michelle Roberts, Science Editor, BBCClinical depression can accelerate the aging processes in cells and make us feel much older than our real age.
Laboratory studies indicate that the cells show signs of accelerated aging in people who suffer from acute depression or have suffered it in the past.
These signs are manifested in the length of telomeric sections of chromosomes. The reduction in telomere length cannot be explained by the action of other factors, for example, smoking.
The results of this study, conducted on the basis of a study of more than 2 thousand patients, are published in the journal Molecular Psychiatry (Verhoeven et al., Major depressive disorder and accelerated cellular aging: results from a large psychiatric cohort study).
Scientists have long known that people suffering from clinical depression are more likely to develop age-related diseases such as cancer, diabetes, obesity and cardiovascular diseases.
This may partly be explained by the behavior of patients with depression, who are often prone to alcoholism and physical inertia.
However, geneticists suspect that depression directly affects our cells.
Telomere length reductionTo conduct this study, Josin Verhoeven from the Medical Center at the Free University of Amsterdam, in collaboration with colleagues from the United States, used the help of 2,407 volunteers who agreed to participate in the study.
More than a third of these volunteers were suffering from depression at that time, a third had experienced clinical depression in the past and a third had never had it.
Volunteers were asked to donate blood for analysis in the laboratory for signs of premature cellular aging.
The researchers were particularly interested in changes in the end sections of chromosomes, called telomeres. Their task is to preserve the genetic code contained in the DNA molecules that make up chromosomes. In the process of cell division, telomeres are constantly shortened, and measuring their length is one of the ways to determine the biological age of an organism.
The study showed that people who suffer from depression or have had it in the past have significantly shorter telomere lengths than people who have never had it. This difference was manifested even against the background of factors such as alcoholism and smoking.
Moreover, patients who suffered from the most severe forms of chronic depression had the shortest telomeres.
Dr. Verhoeven and her colleagues suggest that the shortening of telomeres is a consequence of the body's response to stress caused by depression.
"This large–scale study provides convincing evidence that depression accelerates the processes of biological aging by several years, especially in patients with the most severe and chronic symptoms," the article says.
It remains unclear whether this process affects the overall life expectancy and whether it is reversible.
British geneticist Dr. Anna Phillips from the University of Birmingham also studied the effects of stress on telomere length.
According to her, telomere length is not a reliable indicator of the risk of death and other clinical outcomes.
In addition, it is quite possible that only severe clinical depression, and not the symptoms of minor and moderate depression experienced by many, correlates with telomere length, she believes.
"Depression map" based on the article by Ferrari et al. Burden of Depressive Disorders by Country, Sex, Age, and Year: Findings from the Global Burden of Disease Study 2010 (PLOS Medicine, 2013). Details can be found in the article "Geography of depression: worse than Russia only in Africa" on the Finmarket website – VM
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