14 DAY TRIAL // Researchers at the Pennsylvania State University (Penn State) in Hershey have demonstrated in a new study that children who are exposed to stressful situations, dysfunctional family environments, and poverty exhibit shorter telomeres. These structures are tasked with protecting chromosomes inside cells during division, and stress appears to shorten them prematurely.
This is one of the first studies to certify this type of link between stress and kids' genomes. The research was led on 40, nine-year-old participants, all of whom were African American and from several major cities in the United States. Compared to the telomeres of kids from well-off families and environments, those in children that came from poorer socioeconomic statuses were around 19 percent shorter.
In essence, telomeres are nothing more than repetitive DNA sequences that help protect the ends of chromosomes so that they do not get damaged over time. Some recent studies have suggested that replenishing telomere length could play an important role in preventing aging and prolonging life spans.
What the new study has demonstrated is basically that environmental factors such as being poor and coming from an unstable home can influence genetic material in children. Scientists say that telomere length is usually considered to be a biomarker of chronic stress, Nature News reports. The work appears in the April 7 issue of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).
University of California in San Francisco (UCSF) health psychologist Elissa Epel, who was not a part of the research team, comments that the new study brings scientists a step closer to understanding how exposure to stress during childhood can lead to long-term health problems later on in life. However, the expert admits that more work is needed to validate and further investigate this link.
“This was a small study testing a big theory. It is a first but important step in understanding how social disparities get under the skin to affect lifelong health,” Epel explains. The Penn State group now plans to conduct a larger-scale study, this time on a group of 2,500 children and their mothers. Their main goal is to see whether or not these findings hold.
Researchers say that the data used in this investigation was collected from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study, which includes DNA samples and socioeconomic statistics from all participants. The study tracks around 5,000 children in the United States and is funded by the US National Institutes of Health (NIH).
The new investigation was led by Penn State molecular biologist Daniel Notterman. He explains that the link between the stressful environments and telomere length is explained by two genetic variants associated with the neural pathways that process serotonin and dopamine, two key neurotransmitters in the human brain.