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New, Inexpensive Blood Test Tells You "How Long You Will Live" ... But You Can Cheat and Live Longer
Scientists have developed a simple blood test to determine how long you will live.
How?
By measuring the length of your “telomeres”, the ends of chromosome.
Basically, telomeres allow our cells to divide. When we’re young,
our telomeres are long, and we can produce new cells with ease.
As we age, our telomeres shorten, and it is harder to produce new
cells. With fewer new cells to replace the older ones, we age.
As the New York Times’ Gretchen Reynolds explained last year:
Telomeres are tiny caps on the end of DNA strands — the
discovery of their function won several scientists the 2009 Nobel
Prize in medicine. When cells divide and replicate these long strands
of DNA, the telomere cap is snipped, a process that is believed to
protect the rest of the DNA but leaves an increasingly abbreviated
telomere. Eventually, if a cell’s telomeres become too short, the cell
‘‘either dies or enters a kind of suspended state,’’ says Stephen
Roth, an associate professor of kinesiology at the University of
Maryland who is studying exercise and telomeres. Most researchers now
accept telomere length as a reliable marker of cell age. In general,
the shorter the telomere, the functionally older and more tired the
cell.
The University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas, Department of Cell Biology and Neurosciences proved in 1996 the basic hypothesis using cell cultures:
We … test[ed] the hypothesis that elongation of
telomeres would extend the lifespan of cells in culture… The lifespan
of these hybrid cells was longer than that of the hybrids in which
telomeres had not been elongated. These observations provide the first
direct evidence supporting the hypothesis that telomere length
determines proliferative capacity of human cells.
Ethics
Mark my words, a tidal wave of ethical issues has been released by
the new, inexpensive (around $700 U.S. dollars) blood test for telomere
length.
Initially, every life insurer in the world will demand that all
applicants get the test, for obvious reasons. If you’re telomeres are
really short, you won’t live as long … which radically shifts the
actuarial data. Indeed, as shown below, short telomeres might even
outweigh risk factors such as smoking.
While life insurance will be the area most directly impacted by the
new blood test, many other areas of life could be affected as well.
For example, health insurers may want their insureds to get tests as
well, on the theory that people with shorter telomeres will need more
medical care … and should thus pay higher premiums. As the Independent
notes:
The results of the tests might … be of interest to
companies offering life-insurance policies or medical cover that
depend on a person’s lifetime risk of falling seriously ill or dying
prematurely.
Employers may want their candidates to take the blood test. After
all, why spend years training someone who might soon kick the bucket?
Even lovers might insist their would-be spouses get a test before
saying I do. It’s no fun to have kids with someone who won’t be there
to raise them.
How to cheat
Exercise lengthens telomeres. As the Post-Gazette writes:
People who exercise regularly are up to nine years
younger, biologically, than sedentary people of the same chronological
age, according to a new study by a team of British researchers.
You already knew that people who keep fit live longer than people
who don’t. Studies have shown they’re less likely to have heart
attacks, or to suffer from diabetes, cancer and other degenerative
diseases. What makes this study by a team from Kings College in London
different from all others that have come before it is that it may
explain why.
***
“Exercise helps protect against the slowing-down mechanism.”
The British researchers studied 2,400 twins. Their research focused
on telomeres, the caps at the end of chromosomes, the structures that
carry genes.
When we’re young, our telomeres are long. But every time a cell
divides, telomeres get shorter. When telomeres get too short, the cell
can no longer divide. Cells die. Muscles weaken, skin wrinkles,
eyesight and hearing fade.
Prof. Tim Spector and Dr. Lynn Cherkas of Kings College, and Prof.
Abraham Aviv of the New Jersey Medical School found the telomeres in
those who exercised vigorously were significantly longer than those in
their twins who didn’t. The difference was still significant even if
the twin who exercised smoked or was overweight.
“These data suggest that the act of exercising may actually protect
the body against the aging process,” said Mr. Spector, who is a
professor of genetic epidemiology. The study was published last month
in the Archives of Internal Medicine.
“Overall, the difference in telomere length between the most active
subjects and the inactive subjects corresponds to around nine years of
aging,” Dr. Cherkas said.
To maximize the anti-aging effect of exercise, you need to work out
vigorously for at least three hours a week, the researchers said.“It is not just walking around the block,” said Prof. Spector. “It’s really working up a sweat.”
But people who work out at a moderate pace for an hour to an hour
and a half a week can still reduce their biological age by as much as
four years, the researchers said.
The study indicates that exercise “is actually a buffer against
oxidative stress,” said Dr. Moira Davenport, director of sports and
emergency medicine for Allegheny General Hospital.
Oxidative stress is what damages and kills cells.
“Oxygen is essential to life itself. But it is also inherently
dangerous to our existence. The same process that causes a cut apple to
turn brown or iron to rust is the cause of all the chronic
degenerative diseases we fear and even the aging process itself,” said
Dr. Ray Strand, a specialist in nutritional medicine.
“As oxygen is utilized within the furnace of the cell to create
energy, occasionally a charged oxygen molecule is created, called a
free radical,” Dr. Strand said on his Web site,
nutritional-medicine.net. “If this free radical is not readily
neutralized by an antioxidant, it can go on to create more volatile
free radicals, damage the cell wall, vessel wall, proteins, fats, and
even the DNA nucleus of our cells.”
And the New York Times’ reported last year:
It ‘‘was striking,’’ recalls Dr. Christian Werner, an
internal-medicine resident at Saarland University Clinic in Homburg,
‘‘to see in our study that many of the middle-aged athletes looked much
younger than sedentary control subjects of the same age.’’
***
In Mr. LaRocca’s work,
people were tested both for their V02max — or maximum aerobic
capacity, a widely accepted measure of physical fitness — and their
white blood cells’ telomere length. In subjects 55 to 72, a higher
V02max correlated closely with longer telomeres. The fitter a person
was in middle age or onward, the younger their cells.
***
‘‘One could speculate,’’ he concludes, ‘‘that any form of intense
exercise that is regularly performed over a long period of time’’ will
improve ‘‘telomere biology,’’ meaning that with enough activity, each
of us could outpace the passing years.
An extract of the Chinese herb astragalus has been engineered by a
large California biotech company to produce a supplement which helps protect telomeres.
But many otherwise healthy and reasonably-priced foods and supplements can also protect your telomeres as well.
As Dr. Andrew Weil notes:
A study in Hong Kong suggest[ed] that people who drink
green tea regularly may be younger, biologically, than those who don’t
drink green tea or consume only small amounts. The science here is
somewhat complex, so bear with me while I summarize this fascinating
new study. The researchers looked at the length of telomeres,
repeating DNA sequences at the ends of chromosomes. (One expert
suggests thinking about telomeres as the caps on the ends of shoelaces
that prevent the laces from unraveling.) In cells, telomeres prevent
chromosomes from fusing with one another or rearranging – undesirable
changes that could lead to cancer and other life-threatening diseases.
***
Researchers looked at telomere lengths of 976 Chinese men and 1,030
Chinese women, all over the age of 65. All the study participants
completed a food frequency questionnaire.
***
The researchers reported that telomere length was associated only
with tea drinking – participants with the highest intake, three cups
per day of tea, had longer telomeres than participants who drank an
average of only one quarter of a cup of tea daily. Most participants
drank green tea while a few drank black tea. The investigators
reported that the average difference in telomere length corresponded
to “approximately a difference of five years of life” and that the
“antioxidative properties of tea and its constituent nutrients may
protect telomeres from oxidative damage in the normal aging process.”
In the same article, Weil notes that vitamins C and E also lengthen telomeres:
A recent U.S. study found that telomere length was
longer in women who took multivitamins regularly. Here, researchers
looked at multivitamin use in a group of 586 women between the ages of
35 and 74. They found that higher intakes of the antioxidant vitamins
C and E from food were associated with longer telomere length. The
findings were published in the June 2009 issue of the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition.
Here’s Weil on Omega 3s:
Researchers at the University of California, San
Francisco, have found another action of omega-3s that may help explain
why they offer benefits for the heart. The investigators found that
the more omega-3 consumed by patients with coronary heart disease, the
slower the structures called telomeres at the ends of chromosomes
shrank.
And see this.
Vitamin D
helps to protect telomeres. Vitamin B6, B9 (called “folate”) and B12
help protect telomeres by reducing the amount of homocysteine in the
body. As the Harvard School of Public Health notes:
Folate, vitamin B6, and vitamin B12 play key roles in
converting homocysteine into methionine, one of the 20 or so building
blocks from which the body builds new proteins. Without enough
folate, vitamin B6, and vitamin B12, this conversion process becomes
inefficient and homocysteine levels increase. In turn, increasing
intake of folate, vitamin B6, and vitamin B12 decreases homocysteine
levels.
Why is this important? Because high levels of homocysteine can greatly increase the rate at which your telomeres are shortened (trimethylglycine also significantly lowers homocysteine levels).
Indeed, antioxidants in general helped protect telomeres. As the journal Circulation Research noted in 2004 (please excuse the hyper-technical language):
Aging is associated with a rise in intracellular reactive oxygen species (ROS) and a loss of telomerase reverse transcriptase activity. Incubation with H2O2 induced the nuclear export of telomerase reverse transcriptase (TERT) into the cytosol in a Src-family kinase–dependent manner. Therefore, we investigated the hypothesis that age-related increase in reactive oxygen species (ROS) may induce the nuclear export of TERT and contribute to endothelial cell senescence. Continuous cultivation of endothelial cells resulted in an increased endogenous formation of ROS starting after 29 population doublings (PDL). This increase was accompanied by mitochondrial DNA damage and preceded the onset of replicative senescence at PDL 37. Along with the enhanced formation of ROS, we detected an export of nuclear TERT protein from the nucleus into the cytoplasm and an activation of the Src-kinase. Moreover, the induction of premature senescence by low concentrations of H2O2 was completely blocked with the Src-family kinase inhibitor PP2, suggesting a crucial role for Src-family kinases in the induction of endothelial cell aging. Incubation with the antioxidant N-acetylcysteine, from PDL 26, reduced the intracellular ROS formation and prevented mitochondrial DNA damage. Likewise, nuclear export of TERT protein, loss in the overall TERT activity, and the onset of replicative senescence were delayed by incubation with N-acetylcysteine. Low doses of the statin, atorvastatin (0.1 µmol/L), had also effects similar to those of N-acetylcysteine. We conclude that both antioxidants and statins can delay the onset of replicative senescence by counteracting the increased ROS production linked to aging of endothelial cells.
For plain English information on antioxidant protection, see this, this, this, this and this.
And yes, foodies are in luck: resveratrol from red wine also helps protect telomeres and dark chocolate helps to protect DNA from oxidative damage.
Finally, a positive mindset and relaxation protect telomeres. As
Bill Andrews – Ph.D. in Molecular and Population Genetics, former
Director of Molecular Biology at biotech giant Geron from 1992 to 1997,
one of the principal discoverers of the components of human
telomerase, an enzyme that makes telomeres grow, inventor on 35 U.S.
issued patents related to telomerase, awarded 2nd place as “National
Inventor of the Year” – says:
But then on the mental side it has been shown that
people who have a lot of mental stress have shorter telomeres.
Elizabether Blackburn has published some great papers finding people
who are caregivers for Alzheimer’s patients have shorter telomeres
because they are clearly under a lot of stress. So meditation might be
something that can prevent telomere shortening.
Even pessimism, people who are pessimistic have been shown to have
shorter telomeres. If you ask a person a question like do you think you
will live to be 100 and they say “no” they probably won’t because
thier telomeres are going to be shorter. But if they answer “yes” the
probably will because their telomeres are going to be longer.
So, I try to be very opltimistic, not pessimistic. I try to cause everybody else to have stress, not me.
For more on the benefits of meditation on health and brain functions, see this, this and this.
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Who really wants to work so hard just to hang around on this rock a few more years when you're falling apart and/or losing your mind?
Grandma smoked non filters and enjoyed her daily whisky and a Guiness,
She died peacefully at 98 years old.
Al drove his Suzuki into the end of a bridge one morning, dead at 26.
Aids got Jim,35, Dan, shot dead,28. I could go on...Who listens to this bullshit anymore?
Eggs were deadly in 83 along with that lethal pair Butter and Cheese.
All cholesterol was deadly.
Who will live long enough for the Telomeres to do their bit?
The L.A. health nuts who jog through smog?
Obituary of the future.
She had wonderfull Telomeres but the Peterbuilt that rear ended her V.W. did not care...
George! you are the Man! Thanks! as always Great! info! Tweeted an Facebooked as always with your stuff Buddy! Keep up the great work product!!
Great stuff Mr Washington . I've read here and there about telemores but nice to see so much information compiled into a single and coherent post .
My telomeres are fine, maybe. It's my negative attitude that's killing me.
+100 Hear, Hear
It is relatively old news that Telomeres seem to limit the number of times a cell can proliferate.
But how many people die in their sleep just from old age, without any serious disease involved? And how many of those die relatively young, meaning they might have unusually short Telomeres??
Mostly illnesses limit the life span of an individual, not Telomere lengths.
So this measure is also pretty useless for life insurances.
Short telomeres contribute to many diseases, as well ...
You Go Mr. President. Your site is one of the excellent.
Another crude method for determining lifespan are moles. It was long noted that women have more moles than men and that moles begin to vanish with age.
That the 'mole' seemed to have no biological function other than, perhaps, to make its owner wish it wasn't there, can now be viewed in a more positive light. It is the visible manifestation of our telomeres
GW. Thank you for the article. The most important "take aways" for me were not so much the issues regarding the blood test, but the sections emphasizing exercise and nutrition. Not very much play is given to those two in comments on this blog, with regards to preparing for future shocks to our nation. What good are all the other preparations (stored food, PM's, guns and ammo, etc..) is one is weak and/or in poor health?
So i´m long telomeres..
Alright, who is working on how to lengthen telomere using a homologous crossing over of the nucleic acid strands?
Fuck the vitamins, splice my genome!
Most of what has been found relates to reducing the rate of shortening of the telomeres. Generally the dietary methods relate to increasing the consumption of foods with more polyphenols and antioxidants. The benefits from the green tea work somewhat in that way. Other foods that help are basil, oregano, broccoli, curcumin (turmeric). Some research indicates that the Branch Chain Amino Acids that are components of whey protein will possibly help restore the telomeres.
One fairly easy way to address the problem is to cut down on grains and way down on sugars. Both generate a somewhat continuous inflammation that increases the rate of aging. Add in some more healthy foods such with color and some spices. Include some whey protein in your diet and eat a little broccoli daily with some apples weekly. Swap out some coffee for some green tea. Take a 5000 IU vitamin D3 supplement and fish oil.
All of that is pretty darned inexpensive. It just requires a change in habits but not a real sacrafice in starvation or money. Try to not eat the things which are components of a donut.
Wonder if that counts for folks in Belarus. Some of them might be shortened timelines if they are in the governments way.
Belarus currency crisis and crackdown. Is this what awaits us? Read here:
http://thesilvergoldhedge.blogspot.com/2011/05/belarus-currency-crisis-a...
"government...continued to send regime critics to prison."
Not long before we see this in the USA. Hell they may even send goon squad agents to your kids elementary school for interogation.
This test is absolute bullshit,the only God decide how long you will be leaving and thats is why the future is hidden from us,how about man who is killed by bullet-what about his telomeres?We had see how american soldies killing from hellycopter with night vision technics the people,what those people telomeres in length or what about if you jailed-is stress making your telomeres shorter?what if you are killed in accident or dived and did not got out?Water,Fire,natural deseases,disasters-how about Tsunami making people in thousands to die regardless telomeres length?This inexpensive 700$ thing is just to make money on fools,i can to predict to you you life length just with Taro cards and it could be more accurate that telomeres or by looking into the hand palm,but I do know that man is limited in his abilities to charge future which only God charge,He who is reneuving every day universe may change the order of usual things,our behavier can,He decide to who to add years or not,all scientists is blind man trying to predict things out of their ability and also they have brave to ask 700$?ITs my monthly apparts rent for 3rooms!
Jeez, if you don't want to exercise, just cut to the chase and say so!
Shhh...modern humanity craves certainty...and blame.
wow. kick ass you posted this.
creatine is the key to it all.
... an atp loan you dont have to pay back. -100% interest rates, makes the cell rich, even if the person is not.
Looking at Jamie Olivers new episodes of food revolution in america and I am really now not surprised at all why there is NO revolution about what is going on...
The people in the US are brainwashed to the extent that they will protect big corporations giving junk food to their children... so how can they possibly consider higher thoughts as to how they got to that situation when they are actively contributing to killing their children/shortening their own children's lives???!!!
The US people should seek the real evil that is in their own homes and schools
also look at the data on caloric restriction.
It does the same thing. It dramatically lengthens lifespan and slows down aging processes.
Yes, but antioxidants like resveratol mimic the effects of calorie restriction.
Where's my red wine!!!
I've read about that. It didn't seem too appealing to me to live a long time being constantly hungry though.
You would have to eat a lot of high nutrition/low calorie foods to feel full.
A typical meal would be almost twice the size of what you are probably used to eating.
It's mostly rabbit food also.
Nice one. Thanks for the info George.
And if you live longer than the test says . . well . . you won't. 'Logan's Run' Bitchez!!