Wealthy people may turn to Botox, tummy tucks, and spas in their search for a youthful appearance, but recent evidence suggests that the easy life alone provides some protection from aging.
Tim Spector and his colleagues published an article in Aging Cell about their work with 17 pairs of female identical twins. In each pair, one twin married a poor man while the other married a rich man. Spector et al. measured the sisters’ white blood cell telomeres, the end portions of chromosomes on either end of the meaningful DNA.
Telomeres do not encode any proteins. Instead, we believe they function like the blank parts of a videotape that precede and follow a film. The telomeres allow you to start the machinery without missing the “movie.”
In most chromosomes, we lose about 20 base pairs of telomere DNA per year. Spector’s poor women had about 180 base pairs fewer than their wealthy sisters. In other words, their telomeres were about 9 years older.
We don’t know what aspects of being poor might produce this result. Spector did his work in Great Britain, so we can assume that the women received comparable health care. Stress, diet, and other lifestyle issues may be the culprits.
In the meantime, I suppose we can add this research to our list of reasons why people should stay in school….
For further reading:
- Sozou PD, Kirkwood TBL, 2001. A stochastic model of cell replicative senescence based on telomere shortening, oxidative stress, and somatic mutations in nuclear and mitochondrial DNA. Journal of Theoretical Biology 213, 573-586.
- von Zglinicki T, Bürkle A, Kirkwood TBL, 2001. Stress, DNA damage and ageing – an integrative approach. Experimental Gerontology, 36, 1049-1062.
- St. Thomas’ Hospital Twin Research and Genetic Epidemiology
