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".






"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".

Fish Oils May Slow Genetic Aging in Heart Patients

Organismal stress and telomeric aging: An unexpected connection

Ramin Farzaneh-Far, M.D.

R.I. research links childhood neglect to DNA problems

Reduce Stress, Extend Your Life, Thanks to DNA's 'Life-Expectancy' Gene

Another Possible Benefit of Omega 3 Fish Oil

Accelerated telomere shortening in response to life stress

FINDING REVEALS BROADER ROLE OF TELOMERASE ENZYME, SUGGESTING NEW TARGET FOR EXTENDING LIFE SPAN OF

DOES STRESS SHORTEN LIFE AND SHORTEN TELOMERE LENGTH IN WOMEN CAN YOU LOWER STRESS AND SAVE CHROMOSOME TELOMERE

Telomere length 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".

Organismal stress and telomeric aging: An unexpected connection

Reduce Stress, Extend Your Life, Thanks to DNA's 'Life-Expectancy' Gene

Accelerated telomere shortening in response to life stress

ARE THERE BACTERIA IN SODA POP MACHINES AND FOUNTAINS

Is nothing sacred? Now you even have to watch the soda pop machine! According to an article in the International Journal of Food Microbiology, bacteria were detected in the soda and water from a sample of pop machines tested..



"90 beverages of three types were obtained from 20 self-service and 10 personnel-dispensed previous fountains, analyzed for microbial contamination, and evaluated with respect to U.S. drinking water regulations". A follow-up study compared the concentration and composition of microbial populations in 27 beverages collected from 9 previous fountain machines in the morning as well as in the afternoon. Ice dispensed from these machines was also examined for microbial contamination. While none of the ice samples exceeded U.S. drinking water standards, bacteria was detected in 48% of the beverages and 20% had a heterotrophic plate count greater than 500 cfu/ml. Statistical analyses revealed no difference in levels of microbial contamination between beverage types or between those dispensed from self-service and personnel-dispensed previous fountains.



"More than 11% of the beverages analyzed contained Escherichia coli and over 17% contained Chryseobacterium meningosepticum. Other opportunistic pathogenic microorganisms isolated from the beverages included species of Klebsiella, Staphylococcus, Stenotrophomonas, Candida, and Serratia. Most of the identified bacteria showed resistance to one or more of the 11 antibiotics tested. These findings suggest that previous fountain machines may harbor persistent communities of potentially pathogenic microorganisms which may contribute to episodic gastric distress in the general population and could pose a more significant health risk to immunocompromised individuals. These findings have important public health implications and signal the need for regulations enforcing hygienic practices associated with these beverage dispensers.

Beverages obtained from sodanext term fountain machines in the U.S. contain microorganisms, including previous termcoliformnext term bacteria

Fellatio reduces risk of breast cancer!

I think that this post should be a warning to all that not all medical information available on the web is true. I constantly have patients bringing me the latest information that they have downloaded from the web about their particular condition. 90% of the time, it is rootin tootin junk. It requires great diplomacy to explain that to them, since these web pages usually gives them false hope about the treatments that they may need (or may be able to avoid).

CLAIM: According to a university study, oral sex may significantly decrease the risk of breast cancer in women.

No, this wasn't a real CNN page (or Associated Press article), nor did North Carolina State University perform a study on the connection between fellatio and breast cancer. (If nothing else, the names of the doctors cited in the article — "Dr. B.J. Sooner," "Dr. Inserta Shafteer," "Dr. Len Lictepeen" — should have given it away as a hoax.)

More info here...

Sies!

WHEN GOOD RESEARCH HAPPENS TO BAD DISEASES A THREE POINTER AGAINST LEUKEMIA

How can people live a long life if they have leukemia? Recently "Kareem Abdul-Jabbar announced that he has been diagnosed with leukemia. Specifically, he has chronic myeloid leukemia (CML). Abdul-Jabbar went on to say that his disease can be managed by taking daily oral medication and he expects to live a long healthy life. With leukemia? How is that possible?"

Why Are People Living Longer With Leukemia?

According to the part time blogger and full time pediatric cancer specialist Dr. David, "Abdul-Jabbar has benefited from one of the first and most exciting applications of the translational research I have blogged about in the past....
The answer lies in the molecular biology of CML. It shows how basic research, undertaken for no reason other than to understand the biology of cancer, can lead to unexpected therapeutic breakthroughs. Such research can transform a disease like CML from one that kills without a bone marrow transplant into one that is managed just like high blood pressure".





"Here’s how it happened: Working in Chicago in the 1970’s, Janet Rowley discovered that the “Philadelphia Chromosome,” an abnormal chromosome seen only in the leukemia cells of patients with CML....."

When Bad Things Happen To Famous People

STUDYING ANIMALS THAT DONT GET CANCER TO SEE WHAT WORKS IN HUMANS

Studying Animals that Dont Get Cancer to See What Works in Human Cancer

Why Don't They Get Cancer?

They won't win any beauty contests but apparently an animal called the naked mole rat does not get cancer. Or at least no one has ever detected cancer in it. A recent NYT article said "People have stronger defenses against cancer, as is necessary for a long-lived animal: the disease accounts for 23 percent of human mortality. But the mole rat has taken its anticancer defenses even further: it seems not to get the disease at all. “These animals have never been observed to develop any spontaneous neoplasms,” Vera Gorbunova and colleagues said in an article in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Normally, mammalian cells stop replicating when they come into dense contact with one another, but cancer cells ignore this signal and continue to proliferate, which allows them to clump into tumors in the body. The researchers measured the growth of mole–rat cells and found that cellular growth in the animals was hypersensitive to first contact, compared to mouse cells that continued growing into a dense layer. Naked mole–rat cells forced into high-density situations arrested their growth or even died.






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The authors Gorbunova and Selunov, investigated the pathways responsible for this early contact inhibition and report that two fibroblast pathways are likely responsible for the key anticancer mechanism. Their research shows that inactivating these tumor-suppressor pathways can allow the mole rats to develop cancer.

Lack of contact, lack of cancer

Hypersensitivity to contact inhibition provides a clue to cancer resistance of naked mole-rat

How Can They Live So Long Without Oxygen?

But wait there's more! Dr. Thomas Park and researcher John Larson report "that the brains of adult naked mole rats can withstand oxygen deprivation for a half-hour or more. That knowledge could eventually help in stroke research, Park said".

Why 2 Cancer Protection Pathways Trump Only One

The report in the PNAS said that the rats’ cells have a double system for inhibiting irregular (cell) proliferation (like cancer), compared with the single system in human cells. Gorbunova believes she has found the primary reason these small animals are staying cancer-free, and it appears to be a kind of overcrowding early-warning gene that the naked mole rat expresses in its cells.



When Gorbunova and her team began specifically investigating mole rat cells, they were surprised at how difficult it was to grow the cells in the lab for study. The cells simply refused to replicate once a certain number of them occupied a space. Other cells, such as human cells, also cease replication when their populations become too dense, but the mole rat cells were reaching their limit much earlier than other animals' cells.



"Since cancer is basically runaway cell replication, we realized that whatever was doing this was probably the same thing that prevented cancer from ever getting started in the mole rats," says Gorbunova.

What p16 and p27 do against cancer

Like many animals, including humans, the mole rats have a gene called p27 that prevents cellular overcrowding, but the mole rats use another, earlier defense in gene p16. Cancer cells tend to find ways around p27, but mole rats have a double barrier that a cell must overcome before it can grow uncontrollably.



"We believe the additional layer of protection conferred by this two-tiered contact inhibition contributes to the remarkable tumor resistance of the naked mole rat," says Gorbunova in the PNAS paper.Gorbunova and Seluanov are now planning to delve deeper into the mole rat's genetics to see if their cancer resistance might be applicable to humans.



"The findings, presented in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, show that the mole rat's cells express a gene called p16 that makes the cells "claustrophobic," stopping the cells' proliferation when too many of them crowd together, cutting off runaway growth before it can start. The effect of p16 is so pronounced that when researchers mutated the cells to induce a tumor, the cells' growth barely changed, whereas regular mouse cells became fully cancerous.



"We show that a combination of activated Ras and SV40 LT fails to induce robust anchorage-independent growth in naked mole-rat cells, while it readily transforms mouse fibroblasts. The mechanisms responsible for the cancer resistance of naked mole-rats were unknown. Here we show that naked mole-rat fibroblasts display hypersensitivity to contact inhibition, a phenomenon we termed “early contact inhibition.” Contact inhibition is a key anticancer mechanism that arrests cell division when cells reach a high density. In cell culture, naked mole-rat fibroblasts arrest at a much lower density than those from a mouse. We demonstrate that early contact inhibition requires the activity of p53 and pRb tumor suppressor pathways."



""We think we've found the reason these mole rats don't get cancer, and it's a bit of a surprise," says Vera Gorbunova, associate professor of biology at the University of Rochester and lead investigator on the discovery. "It's very early to speculate about the implications, but if the effect of p16 can be simulated in humans we might have a way to halt cancer before it starts."

The Life Span of a Rodent May Aid Human Health

Dr. Thomas Park Research Interests: Neurobiology of Sensory Systems

Scientists Discover Gene that 'Cancer-Proofs' Rodent's Cells

Dr. V. Gorbunova Research

Naked mole-rat's longevity secret cloaked in mystery

Australian Doctors...

Recently reported by The Daily Maverick...

The Australian Medical Association ran an advertisement in newspapers offering a bounty of A$3,000 (just over R20,000) to anyone who persuades a foreign doctor to work in that country.

We're short 2500 doctors in this bloody country. Oz should leave ours alone!