What does aging and violence have in common? According to a new study on stress if you want anti-aging stop the bullying. Most people don’t know that stress actually causes aging on the cellular level. Fox News reported…
Stress: Anti-Aging Stop The Bullying
Children exposed to multiple instances of violence age faster on a cellular level than children without violent experiences, a new study finds.
Although childhood stress has long been linked with later disease risk and health problems, the study is the first to show accelerated biological aging in childhood as a result of stress.
“Those kids are ‘older’ than they are supposed to be,” said study leader Idan Shalev, a postdoctoral researcher at Duke University. If the cellular aging isn’t reversed, Shalev told LiveScience, the children would likely be at risk for premature death.
Violence and stress
To gauge biological aging, Shalev and his colleagues examined a portion of DNA called telomeres. These sequences cap the ends of our chromosomes (packets of DNA), but they get shorter with every cell division, acting as a sort of molecular “clock” that signals wear-and-tear on DNA.
Several studies have found that adults who experienced violence as children tend to have shorter telomeres than those with peaceful childhoods. But those studies couldn’t determine whether the telomeres had been shortened because of childhood stress or because of later adult health problems stemming from that stress, Shalev said.
To find out which was the case, he and his colleagues began a study that looked not backward, but ahead. Using a sample of 236 children from a British sample born between 1994 and 1995, the researchers took DNA samples by swabbing the children’s cheeks and then measured the length of each child’s telomeres at age 5 and age 10.
Click here to read more about stress and premature aging
Here are my thoughts… while many people get up in arms about violence and bullying and what should or shouldn’t be done about it. How it isn’t right and how it shouldn’t be happening. Everyone knows that attempting to make someone do something or stop something (i.e. violence/bullying) is not all that effective. Why not teach both victims of violence and those that perpetrate violence and bullying how to handle stress effectively.
It makes sense to deal with the source rather than the symptom doesn’t it? Wouldn’t that address all the concerns of stress anti-aging and bullying?