Anticipating future events may contribute to stress-related increased risk for the diseases of aging, including cancer, according to a study to be published in the May issue of the journal Brain, Behavior and Immunity.
The study, by researchers at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), involved 50 women, of whom about half cared for relatives with dementia. In the laboratory, those most impacted by the anticipation of stressful tasks, including public speaking and solving math problems, appeared older at the cellular level. For the study, cellular age was determined by measuring telomeres. Short telomeres indicate older cellular age. They are associated with increased risk for many diseases of aging, including cancer, heart disease, and stroke.
According to researchers, when caregivers were told that they would be asked to perform the same public speaking and math tasks, those caregivers expected more of a threat than non-caregivers. This tendency toward stress put them at greater risk for short telomeres. Based on the results, researchers believe higher levels of anticipated threat in everyday life may encourage cellular aging in individuals under constant stress.
“How you respond to a brief stressful experience in the laboratory may reveal a lot about how you respond to stressful experiences in your daily life,” said Aoife O’Donovan, PhD, a Society in Science: Branco Weiss Fellow at UCSF and the study’s lead author. “Our goal is to gain better understanding of how psychological stress promotes biological aging so that we can design targeted interventions that reduce risk for disease in stressed individuals. We now have preliminary evidence that higher anticipatory threat perception may be one such mechanism.”
Source: UCSF.
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