14 DAY TRIAL // Investigators have recently determined that people who were subjected to traumatic experiences as children tend to be at an increased risk of experiencing the full effects of age-related diseases.
Such conditions include autoimmune, neurodegenerative and cardiovascular diseases, as well as cancer and a host of other disorders. These individuals are also at risk of early death due to all of these conditions, the team has learned.
Of these individuals, people who also suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) are at especially high risk. Their telomeres – the chromosomal caps that control the multiplication of individual cells – are noticeably shorter than in people not subjected to traumatic experiences.
Telomeres are mostly DNA-protein complex that get shorter ever time a cell multiplies, and the genetic material it contains needs to be duplicated. In some people, these protective structures are shorter, whereas in others they are longer.
In the new investigation, researchers wanted to learn whether PTSD and exposure to traumatic events in the distant past had any connection to the length of telomeres. For this purpose, the study group selected 43 PTSD patients and 47 healthy control subjects.
Experts with the University of California in San Francisco (UCSF) and the San Francisco VA Medical Center determined that, on average, PTSD patients had shorter telomeres than their healthy peers.
“This was striking to us, because the subjects were relatively young, with an average age of 30, and in good physical health. Telomere length was significantly shorter than we might expect in such a group,” says Aoife O’Donovan.
The expert, who was the lead author of the new study, holds an appointment as a psychiatry researcher at both the SFVAMC and UCSF, PsychCentral reports. “People who had multiple categories of childhood traumas had the shortest telomere length,” O'Donovan explains.
One of the most peculiar connections that the researchers made was discovering that PTSD patients with no history of childhood trauma had the same average telomere length as healthy individuals.
“For one thing, this gives us a potential mechanism for why people with PTSD tend to have a greater disease burden and more problems with aging. It might be because of their telomere biology,” says Thomas Neylan, MD.
He was the principal investigator of the new study. The expert is the director of the PTSD program at SFVAMC, and also a professor in residence of psychiatry at UCSF.
“We might be seeing the cumulative effect of PTSD on telomere length – in other words, the subjects with shorter telomere length may have PTSD dating from their childhood traumas, in addition to PTSD acquired in adulthood” the expert concludes.