From Dr. Jay Kumar - Health, Stress, and Aging
May-09-2012

We all aspire living a long, healthy, and abundant life. Despite our best intentions to remain young and stay healthy, aging is a fact that we all have to accept. While the latest anti-aging products, Botox injections, or cosmetic surgery maintain the outward appearance of youth and beauty, medical research now shows how you can slow down the aging process on the cellular level. Want to learn how?

Let's begin by exploring the aging process from a biological perspective. While many might regard aging as an external condition of looking older, in actuality physical aging is the biological result of the inability for your cells to replicate and produce new ones as the body advances over time. One of the most startling and revolutionary ideas to come out of the medical sciences is the discovery of telomeres, an enzyme in your genes that regulates cellular division and, in turn, determines your length of life. In essence, the length of your telomeres now appear to act as your body's natural biological clock. When under constant stress, your biological clock speeds up, resulting in the shortening of telomeres. On the contrary, when you're more calm and relaxed telomeres appear to extend their length, thus slowing down the body's biological clock. Let's take a closer look at how telomeres function, how stress accelerates their decay, what you can do to slow down their eventual breakdown, and ways to live a more healthy and long life.

As you grow older, your hair turns gray, your organs begin to work less, your bones become weaker, and your body generally ages, all of which now appear to be the result of the shortening of the telomeres in your cells. So what exactly are telomeres? In every one of your genes, there exist 26 pairs of chromosomes that are capped off by telomeres. A nice analogy is to visualize your chromosome as a shoelace with a cap at the end of the lace as the telomere. Over the course of time due to natural wear and tear these caps at the end of your shoelaces begin to fray. In a similar manner, the telomeres that act as caps at the end of your chromosomes also begin to wear down and shorten. In the emerging medical field of psychoneuroimmunology, the intimate connection of the mind, brain, and stress with our immune system and aging is being greatly understood. In essence, a growing medical body of evidence concludes that stress advances the shortening of your telomeres, which in turn prevents cellular reproduction and eventually accelerating the aging process.

This remarkable finding regarding the effects of stress on telomere shortening and age acceleration actually earned Dr. Elizabeth Blackburn and her colleagues the Nobel prize for medicine in 2009. Her study examined people exposed to chronic stress, depression, and anxiety and concluded that for every one chronological year of aging, the shortening of these people's telomeres accelerated by as much as 600%. Basically, in just one year the aging process of these people amounted to six years of biological aging!

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Posted by Ken at 6:49 PM - Link to this entry  |  Share this entry  |  Print