MAYBE REDUCING STRESS AND EATING OMEGA 3 FISH OIL CAN MAKE YOU LIVE LONGER BY IMPACTING THE LENGTH OF CHROMOSOME TELOMERES
So I had just written about research which could demonstrate that reducing stress could make you live longer when along comes this story about fish oil relationship to telomere length and living longer! And they are both from the University of California at San Francisco!
In a study that appeared in the Journal of the American Medical Association, "Dr. Ramin Farzaneh-Far of the University of California San Francisco and colleagues followed more than 600 men with heart disease and found those taking the most omega-3 appeared "biologically younger", that is, the ends of their chromosomes, called telomeres, looked longer and healthier".
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"Patients with the highest levels of omega-3 fish oils were found to display the slowest decrease in telomere length, whereas those with the lowest levels of omega-3 fish oils in the blood had the fastest rate of telomere shortening," Farzaneh-Far said. "This suggests that these patients were aging faster than those with higher fish oil levels"".
"Cardiologists from the University of California, San Francisco, and other hospitals measured telomere length over five years in 608 patients who had coronary-artery blockage and previous heart attacks. Researchers found that people with high levels of omega-3 fatty acids in their white blood cells experienced significantly less shortening of telomeres over five years, as compared with patients with lower omega-3 levels".
Telomere length in chromosomes has been linked to the length of life, a telomere is a region of repetitive DNA at the end of a chromosome, which protects the end of the chromosome from deterioration. The question is does stress shorten the telomere length? A recent Fox news story said that University of California San Francisco researchers "chose to study women caring for gravely ill children with chronic illnesses and disabilities. They found that women who were the most traumatized by their situation had significantly shorter telomeres. They reached that conclusion by comparing that group to women with decidedly more normal levels of stress".
Dr. Elizabeth Blackburn, who won the Nobel prize for for the discovery of how chromosomes are protected by telomeres and the enzyme telomerase has compared telomeres to the tips on the ends of shoelaces that keep them from fraying.
Previous work has suggested a connection between stress and the length of the telomere.
"Over the years, some findings have supported this intuitively appealing idea (of Women who were more stressed had shorter telomeres and more oxidative stress.) One literature for example, demonstrates how repeated challenges to glucose homeostasis can exacerbate adult-onset diabetes and accelerate the nonenzymatic formation of advanced glycation end products . Other studies have shown that prolonged exposure to one class of stress hormones can accelerate an aspect of brain senescence , whereas prolonged suffering from a stress-related psychiatric disorder (i.e., major depression) increases the risk of heart disease. And some reports have linked stress, or the hormones of stress, to the generation of oxygen radicals . But, with the exception of those final studies, relatively little work has linked chronic stress with endpoints that transcend particular organ systems and, instead, concern the fundamental cell biology of aging. In the study reported by Epel et al.an interdisciplinary team presents exciting evidence for such a link".
