The secret to anti-ageing does not come in an expensive bottle of face cream but with regular sleep, exercise and a balanced diet.
While the benefits of a healthy lifestyle have been known for decades, a new study has found sensible lifestyle choices can offset the ageing of one of the body’s most basic, yet vital components – our DNA.
As humans grow and age, the protective cap on the ends of strands of DNA, which are found in almost every cell in the body, shorten.
The degrading of these caps, known as telomeres, has been linked to many age-related illnesses such as cardiovascular and Alzheimer’s disease.
In some of these, chronic stress is thought to play a role in speeding up the degradation of telomeres. This ages the body’s immune system, making it more vulnerable to illness.
Children who endured a disadvantaged upbringing, and women who care for a chronically ill family member or have been victims of domestic violence, have shorter telomeres than those who have not experienced such stressful events.
To see whether lifestyle could slow cellular ageing in older women, a team of researchers, including Nobel prize-winning Australian molecular biologist Elizabeth Blackburn, studied more than 200 non-smokers, aged between 50 and 65, for a year.
They found that stressful events, such as the death of a family member, serious financial pressure, divorce or sexual harassment, had a measurable effect on the length of women’s telomeres over the year.
In women who did not engage in healthy behaviours, for each stressful event they endured the building blocks of their telomeres caps were reduced by 76.5 “base pairs”, on average.
In contrast, women who slept well, exercised and ate a balanced diet appeared to be protected from stress-induced telomere shortening.
The group, led by Eli Puterman from the University of California, found it was the combined benefits of eating well, exercising and getting sufficient sleep that reduced the effect of stress on telomere length rather than any individual behaviour.
One of the significant outcomes of the research, published in the journal Molecular Psychiatry, was that it demonstrated how external factors such as chronic stress could influence telomere length over such a short period of time as a year.
“The hopeful message [is] that engagement in healthy behaviours during periods of high stress can perhaps attenuate immune cell ageing,” Dr Puterman said.