Take care of the children
Scientists: Childhood injuries shorten life at the cellular level
Stress and adversity suffered in childhood lead to accelerated reduction of telomeres – the terminal sections of chromosomes that protect DNA from damage. As a result, the cells age faster, and eventually a person dies earlier than it could happen in other conditions.
Scientists from the USA and Canada, led by Eli Puterman from the University of British Columbia (Vancouver), told about this in their article for the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (Lifespan adversity and later adulthood telomere length in the nationally representative US Health and Retirement Study), Time magazine (How Childhood Trauma Can Cause Premature Aging).
In total, the study covered 4,598 men and women over 50 years of age with different health conditions, education level, physique and lifestyle. Saliva samples were taken from all of them and the length of telomeres in DNA was measured using a polymerase chain reaction.
Then the participants were asked in detail about their life experiences, stressful situations, difficulties that they had to face both in childhood and in adulthood. Negative experience was conditionally divided into two groups – financial and social problems. The first included situations such as losing a job, getting food cards (issued to the poor) in adulthood, as well as losing a job by parents or being deprived of a home as a child. Social traumas, in particular, included the death of a child or one of the spouses, participation in adult hostilities and abuse of parents, their addiction to drugs or alcohol, problems with the police in childhood.
As it turned out, financial problems practically did not affect the length of the participants' telomeres, and it does not matter if they happened in childhood or already in adulthood.
Unfavorable social experience in adulthood turned out to be more dangerous: each stress factor led to a shortening of telomeres by 8 percent. But when the results were adjusted to account for other variables, such as genetics, education, or smoking experience, this effect was practically reduced to zero.
Which, however, did not happen in the case of a negative social experience in childhood. The study showed that each serious stress factor caused a reduction in telomere length by 11 percent at once, and the indicator remained stable despite other variables. This matters even considering that the study was conducted on the basis of the subjective memories of the participants themselves: people tend to exaggerate positive rather than negative experiences.
The mechanism that translates childhood suffering into changes at the gene level is not completely clear, but scientists believe that this happens at the level of the epigenome. That is, when there is a change in the expression of individual genes, but the DNA structure does not change.
Portal "Eternal youth" http://vechnayamolodost.ru
04.10.2016