Unemployment in Males Can Cause Shorter Lifespan

Unemployment is known to take an emotional toll on most people. However, researchers at Imperial College London and the University of Oulu, Finland have found that males who have been unemployed for over two years have shown signs of accelerated aging in their DNA. They took the DNA samples from 5,620 men and woman born in Finland in 1966, and measured the telomeres, which are located at the ends of the chromosomes. Telomeres are structures that protect the genetic code from losing base pairs and stop the chromosomes from fusing into each another. Over time, it undergoes cell division multiple times, in which it eventually loses 25-200 base pairs per division. Once the telomere becomes too short, the chromosome reaches a “critical length” and can no longer undergo replication. This would result in the aging of the cell and it’s eventual death due to apoptosis. Dr. Jessica Buxton, a member of the Imperial research group, says that shorter telomere are linked to higher risk of age related diseases, such as type 2 diabetes, which lead to an earlier death. Experiencing too much stress during childhood and adulthood has shown to be linked to accelerated telomere shortening.

During their studies, they looked at telomere length in blood cells samples collected in 1997, when all the participants were 31 years old. They compared the samples collected in 1966 with the sample collected in 1997 and discovered that the unemployed men were more than twice as likely to have shorter telomeres in comparison to men who were constantly employed. The study includes other social, biological, and behavioral factors that could have affected the results, to prevent the speculation that short telomere were linked to medical conditions that could have played a part in preventing the participants from working.  The results from this study have shown that long-term unemployment may cause a physical toll as well.

The reason why this pattern was seen specifically in only males may be because there were fewer unemployed women than men in the study group. Further research may reveal whether long-term unemployment can be more harmful for men than women. This study is one of the first to link long term unemployment with poor health at a cellular level, meaning that the focus on decreasing the unemployment rate may prove to be crucial for a healthier future generation.

Original article: http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/releases/269145.php