Left page: Spain’s Sha Wellness Clinic offers telomere analysis This page: Reducing stress can slow the ageing process
Indeed, telomere length is one of
the best biomarkers of overall health status, indicating the impact of diet, fi tness, toxins and chronic stress. Telome Health, for example, will offer a TeloAge report in which your personal telomere length is presented compared to a healthy control population in your age and gender group, to gauge how you measure up to the healthy average. Repeating the tests over time gives you the best view into how your cells are ageing, and whether your current lifestyle is working for or against you. At ReNove Med Spa in Delaware,
US, Dr Michelle Parsons uses telomere testing to optimise recommendations to clients. She says: “When a test reveals an older physiological age [than their chronological age], clients are relieved to discover there are ways of slowing telomere shortening through lifestyle changes. In this respect it’s not merely a static test, but a useful tool to measure positive change in their health.” But how do we know all this? And what lifestyle aspects in particular – bad
July 2013 © Cybertrek 2013
or good – have been proven to have an impact on telomeres?
Landmark research In 1978, Dr Elizabeth Blackburn, an American biological researcher, first described telomeres’ molecular DNA structure. Then, in 1985, she discovered the telomerase enzyme. Blackburn and two colleagues received the 2009 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for “the discovery of how chromosomes are protected by telomeres and the enzyme telomerase”. In 1990, renowned biochemist Calvin
Harley showed that telomeres shorten progressively in human cells. He was instrumental in demonstrating that this is a cause of cellular ageing, and that telomerase can prevent this action. In 2004, Elissa Epel – a leader in
health psychology and behavioural medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, US – pioneered research that linked stress to immune cell ageing. Epel showed that the perception of stress, as well as actual stressful events
or thoughts, is related to telomere shortness and reduced telomerase activity. In plain words, she proved that stress ages you at a cellular level. And in a 2008 study, published in scientifi c journal The Lancet Oncology, Epel, Blackburn and physician Dr Dean Ornish showed that “lifestyle changes can signifi cantly increase telomerase activity”, with positive changes taking place in just 90 days. In November 2010, a group of
Harvard University researchers published results from a study in Nature. The experiment involved mice that were genetically engineered to lack telomerase, so they aged prematurely and died. In a second group of mice, they turned on the telomerase gene with shocking results. For the fi rst time ever, an aged state of an animal was reversed and the mice effectively became young again. In the same year, Blackburn, Harley,
Epel and molecular biologist Jue Lin co- founded Telome Health in an attempt to widen the reach of telomere testing.
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