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You are here: Home / Archives for Telomere Testing

Telomere Testing

What is Telomere Testing?

May 11, 2015 By Connie Odom

telomere testingEveryone wants to keep their skin looking vibrant, beautiful, and youthful. Some will spend hundreds of dollars on expensive creams and lotions, or even pay thousands for more permanent solutions such as Botox or plastic surgery. The real key to anti-aging though does not have to be so drastic. Scientists have found a key to determining how quickly your body will age and it is contained within your DNA. Telomeres are little caps at the very ends of your chromosomes that help to create each individual strand of DNA, making up your body’s unique composition. It was recently discovered that these little known pieces of genetic material hold a unique possibility for helping us change how quickly your body ages as well as predicting serious diseases such as cancer.

When a scientist looks at a telomere under a microscope, they can tell how old that piece of genetic material is by the length of the caps. If the telomeres are short, that means that the particular genetic material has a shorter length of life than the usual healthy cells. Overtime this will lead to the eventual breakdown of the body, as is common with old age. Now scientists are able to observe how certain daily environmental factors such as sun exposure, pollution inhalation, diet, and levels of physical activity affect our body down to our very DNA cells. Many working in the health and beauty world are lauding telomeres as a great discovery and as an early warning sign of the current condition that your body.

So how is telomere testing done? We will measure the telomere length on your white blood cells and compare it with those in your age range across the country. The goal is to be within the average parameters as other people in your age group to make sure that you are on target and not aging too rapidly. While being under the national average is desirable, being over the national average can be an early sign that your body is developing some serious health issues such diabetes and cancer. This will allow you to start managing your disease before it gets out of hand or eradicate it while it is still reversible.

Doctors and aging specialists alike think that this is a breakthrough that will help to slow or alter a person’s aging or prevent premature aging in the first place. Even if you find yourself with short telomeres, research is finding more and more ways to reduce the signs of aging, allowing you to turn back the hands of time before they catch up with you. Do yourself a favor and see how you rate on the telomere test. It might not just save your skin, but it may even save your life.

To schedule a consultation at Metro MediSpa call 888-637-7228.

Can Keeping your Telomeres Longer Minimize Aging?

May 6, 2015 By Connie Odom

Longer Telomeres Minimizes AgingMany people look in the mirror and feel that what they see staring back at them does not reflect how they feel inside.  They often want to turn back the hands of time to when they had more healthy, youthful, and radiant skin. People are so desperate that they are willing to shell out thousands of dollars every year for creams, serums, and procedures to make them look younger. What if there was a way for you to prevent aging before it started or even reverse your body’s aging without a surgery or some magic pill?  This secret doesn’t come down to some special formula or an experimental procedure. In fact it all comes down to your biology and things that you can do to change the aging process within you. The key to combating aging starts at a molecular level and begins with your telomeres.

When a scientist looks at a telomere under a microscope, they can tell how old that piece of genetic material is by the length of the caps. Shorter telomeres means that the particular cell has a shorter length of life than the usual healthy cells. Every time a cell divides, the resulting cells have shorter telomeres.  If the telomeres become too short, the cell will not divide.  This is a game changing breakthrough that allows professionals to pinpoint how quickly you will age compared to others in your age group. Many of those that work in the health and beauty world are lauding telomeres as a great discovery and as an early warning sign of the condition that your body is in currently. Continued research is needed to know if there are ways to manipulate these telomeres outside of your everyday lifestyle, but this is considered a major breakthrough for the beauty industry nonetheless. Telomeres provide professionals with information that can be used to execute a plan to create longer telomeres and increase the life of your body’s cells.

Your telomeres reveal how different factors in your environment affect your body’s cells down to your very DNA. The length of your telomeres tell medical professionals your likelihood of premature aging as well as your risk for certain cancers. The longer your telomeres, the longer the lifespan of your cells. Your telomeres are affected by your diet, the amount of activity you participate in, your exposure to the sun, pollutants, and other environmental factors.  Telomeres hold much potential for researchers in order to reverse aging and catching chronic illnesses in the very early stages. Not only can having longer telomeres make you appear younger but it can also make you feel younger as well increasing your mobility, reducing pain, and increased energy.

While it is not possible to halt the aging process altogether, by keeping your telomeres long you can minimize aging including all the unwanted parts of aging including wrinkles, receding hairlines, arthritis, and weakness. While aging is inevitable, by keeping your telomeres longer you can be someone who ages very gracefully and enjoy a full and happy life for many decades to come. Premiere health providers are using telomeres as a means of turning back the hands of time and allowing you to enjoy living life well into your golden years. The science of telomeres seems to be the closest that we have come yet to the fountain of youth.

New View of Depression: An Ailment of the Entire Body

April 11, 2012 By kima

written by Shirley S. Wang

Scientists are increasingly finding that depression and other psychological disorders can be as much diseases of the body as of the mind.

Shirley Wang on Lunch Break discusses the impact of depression on aging and why people with a history of depression are also known to be at greater risk for cardiovascular disease, diabetes and other aging-related diseases.

People with long-term psychological stress, depression and post-traumatic stress disorder tend to develop earlier and more serious forms of physical illnesses that usually hit people in older age, such as stroke, dementia, heart disease and diabetes. Recent research points to what might be happening on the cellular level that could account for this.

Scientists are finding that the same changes to chromosomes that happen as people age can also be found in people experiencing major stress and depression.

The phenomenon, known as “accelerated aging,” is beginning to reshape the field’s understanding of stress and depression not merely as psychological conditions but as body-wide illnesses in which mood may be just the most obvious symptom.

“As we learn more…we will begin to think less of depression as a ‘mental illness’ or even a ‘brain disease,’ but as a systemic illness,” says Owen Wolkowitz, a psychiatry professor at the University of California, San Francisco, who along with colleagues has conducted research in the field.

Gaining a better understanding of the mechanisms that link physical and mental conditions could someday prove helpful in diagnosing and treating psychological illnesses and improving cognition in people with memory problems, Dr. Wolkowitz says.

In an early look at accelerated aging, researchers at Duke University found about 20 years ago that brain scans of older people with depression showed much faster age-related loss of volume in the brain compared with people without depression. The reasons for the accelerated aging appeared to go beyond unhealthy behaviors, like smoking, diet and lack of exercise, researchers said.

Recent efforts to study what is behind accelerated aging on a cellular level have focused on telomeres, a protective covering at the ends of chromosomes that have been recognized as playing an important role in aging. Telomeres get shorter as people age, and shortened telomeres also are related to increased risk of disease and mortality.

In several studies conducted at UCSF, researchers have found shortened telomere length to be associated with depression, childhood trauma and other conditions. A study of 43 adults with chronic post-traumatic stress disorder, whose average age was about 30, and 47 healthy control subjects, found shorter telomere length in the PTSD group that equated to an estimated 4.5 years of accelerated aging, Dr. Wolkowitz says. The study was published last year in Biological Psychiatry.

In separate research, scientists in Sweden found similar results. In a study involving 91 patients with major depression and 451 healthy control subjects, researchers from Umeå University concluded that shortened telomere length was associated with depression and greater perceived life stress. The study was published in Biological Psychiatry in February.

Scientists say more work needs to be done to figure out exactly how severe a psychological experience must be to affect telomere length. Some research suggests that as few as two episodes of major depression may be sufficient to affect cell structure. Other studies indicate that the more bouts of depression a person experiences, the more impact there is on telomere length.

The “holy grail” of this area of work is to try to find the molecular mechanisms by which depression or stress take their toll on the body, says P. Murali Doraiswamy, head of the division of biological psychiatry at Duke University, who isn’t involved in telomere work. Such information could help provide clues about how much of age-related disease is due to genetics versus life experience, and whether it can be reversed, he says.

Researchers also want to understand why not all stressed people develop shortened telomeres. Telomere length is thought to be affected by the body’s production of certain stress hormones or inflammatory molecules, which are made in greater quantities when people are stressed or depressed. Meanwhile, an enzyme known as telomerase acts to protect against telomere shortening.

Some people appear to have innate biological protective factors, like higher antioxidant level and anti-inflammatory proteins, according to UCSF’s Dr. Wolkowitz.

How individuals experience the stress, cope with it and view the world more generally also are thought to relate to telomere length. In 2009, the UCSF researchers found that a personality characteristic, pessimism, correlated with shorter telomeres and increased production of a chemical produced by the immune system related to stress.

In another study, UCSF researchers brought into the lab 50 women and exposed them to standard experimental tasks known to induce stress: giving a speech about their personal strengths and weaknesses and completing a difficult math problem out loud. Some of the women were caregivers for chronically ill children and therefore had presumably more stressful lives. But telomere length didn’t seem to depend on whether a woman was one of the caregivers or not. Instead, the telomeres were shorter only in those women who reported greater levels of anxiety about having to perform the experimental tasks—seemingly the ones who tended to get more stressed about life’s challenges. The research, led by UCSF postdoctoral fellow Aoife O’Donovan, was published online in March in the journal Brain, Behavior, and Immunity.

Researchers believe it takes months, or even years, for stress or depression to affect telomere length. However, the level of activity of the enzyme telomerase may be affected more quickly. In a pilot study involving 24 patients with prostate cancer, Dean Ornish, founder of the Preventive Medicine Research Institute, a nonprofit research group in Sausalito, Calif., demonstrated that telomerase activity in blood cells increased after three months of changes in the patients’ lifestyle, including lowering of cholesterol and psychological distress. Although the study didn’t measure telomere length, the researchers suggested that increased telomerase activity in the patients could be signaling greater telomere protection at the cellular level. The study, performed together with UCSF researchers, was published in the Lancet Oncology in 2008.

Heightened telomerase levels have been found in some depressed people who are given an antidepressant. These patients also show improvement in clinical measurements of their depression. Other depressed patients, however, who don’t show clinical improvements after being given medication, also didn’t experience an increase in levels of the enzyme. The findings are from a small study published in February in Molecular Psychiatry.

After finding that some psychological conditions appear to affect telomere length, researchers at UCSF are trying to find out whether information about what is going on in a patient’s cells can be used to change the person’s psychology. In an ongoing study, researchers are telling patients how their telomere length, which can be detected through a blood sample, compares with that of an average person of the same age. Researchers are then tracking whether the patients, armed with that information, are more motivated to adopt a healthier lifestyle.

Early Aging

People who have major bouts of depression have an increased risk at a younger age of developing conditions typically associated with getting older. This may be because depression makes cells age prematurely, new research suggests.

•Heart disease
•Atherosclerosis
•Hypertension
•Stroke
•Dementia
•Osteoporosis
•Type 2 diabetes
Source: Owen Wolkowitz, UCSF

Telomere Testing Identifies the Age of Your Body

February 7, 2012 By kima

Telomeres are sections of genetic material at the end of each chromosome whose primary function is to prevent chromosomal “fraying” when a cell replicates. As a cell ages, its telomeres become shorter. Eventually, the telomeres become too short to allow cell replication, the cell stops dividing and will ultimately die – a normal biological process. SpectraCell’s Telomere Test can determine the length of a patient’s telomeres in relation to the patient’s age.

This testing does not tell you how long you have to live. Instead it tell you how well you are aging on the inside. If you know how you are aging, you can make some lifestyle adjustments, if needed before it’s too late, to affect your overall health.

Your genes are set but you have an affect on them with your lifestyle choices.

Watch this video to learn more:

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Is this test worth the cost?

Think of it like a stress test. It’s a component. Now fix what’s wrong with your lifestyle. Check back a year later and see how your efforts have paid off.

To schedule your testing, contact Metro MediSpa today. Don’t wait until it’s too late.

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