The Myth of Normal 58

Another study observed higher rates of inflammation in African Americans than in Caucasians, an epigenetic effect that remained even when comparing those of the same socioeconomic level.[10] “We found that experiences with racism and discrimination accounted for more than 50% of the black/white difference in the activity of genes that increase inflammation,” wrote the lead author, Dr. April Thames, in an article titled “Racism Shortens Lives and Hurts Health of Blacks by Promoting Genes That Lead to Inflammation and Illness.”[11] Much like gene expression, telomeres manifest the vagaries of fate and history, class and race, stress and trauma. How? At birth, telomeres have many “units”—the DNA base pairs of which they are constituted—and by old age, far fewer. “We start out with about ten thousand when we’re a baby, and we get down to four thousand when we die,” Elissa Epel told me. Every time a cell in our body divides, telomeres shorten; when they get too short, their host cell dies or may deteriorate and become dysfunctional. As they shrink, immune function is impaired, inflammation rises, and we fall more prone to illness. Telomeres have been called “cellular clocks,” in that they are a measure of biological rather than chronological age. Two people, even identical twins, could be the same age as computed in years, months, weeks, and days, yet one may be biologically older than the other, depending on how much stress, adversity, or trauma they have endured. That’s because stress shortens telomeres. (Doctors should take special heed: the telomeres of medical residents suffer greater attrition than those of other young adults in their age group.)[12] One of Dr. Epel’s studies found that caregiving mothers of chronically ill children had shorter telomeres than their counterparts of the same age. This biological age differential was proportionate to both the number of years of caregiving and the degree of stress as perceived by the moms.[13] Similar results were seen in caregivers of people with dementia: shortened telomeres and impaired immunity, reinforcing the idea that “chronic psychological stress has a negative impact on immune cell function and may accelerate their aging.”[14] In other words, stress ages our chromosomes, and therefore ages us.