Wednesday, April 16, 2014
Stress can affect your genome
Daniel Notterman has discovered that stressful living environments may alter telomeres. Telomeres are nucleotide sequences that are located on the ends of chromatids that protect the genetic information in the chromosome during replication. Daniel studied 40 nine-year old African American children from different backgrounds and life style. He took DNA samples during different stages of life along with the life style changes. What he found was that the children who grew up in stressful situation have telomeresthat were 40% shorter. While they have not been able to discover the reason for the change it does add an interesting argument to the "Nature vs Nurture" debate.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
This is an interesting study because now so many people are talking about being stressed and every other medicine commercial are some sort of stress reliever. So if it shows that stress can shorten the ends of chromatids this may end up damaging genetic info while replication and that I can imagine that can cause a lot problems. Its not listed how this could cause problems but that would be an interesting thing to look out.
ReplyDeleteDoctors always talk about having a balanced lifestyle and not being too stressed. It seems that stress can lead to a number of health risks. It is hard to stay calm in such a chaotic world, especially in college with so much homework and work on the side.
ReplyDeleteI found several questionable areas in this study. The largest is the way the researchers arrived at the concluding sentence, “We suggest that an individual’s genetic architecture moderates the magnitude and direction of the physiological response to exogenous stressors.” They deliberately skewed the experimental 40-person sample, then made “findings” by pretending that contrasting two 20-person skewed samples of 9-year old boys represented something about stress and genetics in a larger population of children without proving their case.
ReplyDeleteResearchers cannot validly do this in children’s brain studies, for a comparable example. It is well known that long-term stress causes a child’s brain to develop differently than an unstressed child’s brain.
Further, instead of establishing a control group, the researchers split their sample according to maternal depression, which is an experimentally proven contributor to epigenetic changes detrimental to a developing fetus and on to infancy and early childhood. There are dozens of studies on that subject from which to choose on PNAS.org.
So, of course, in general “..an individual’s genetic architecture moderates the magnitude and direction of the physiological response to exogenous stressors.” But the researchers didn’t do the work to find out whether it was the genetic architecture that the 9-year-olds were epigenetically changed into, or the genetic architecture they were conceived with, that stored the damage. I presume that this additional work wasn’t pursued because those type of findings wouldn’t make the race-baiting headlines of the press coverage this study was designed for.
Which leads me to ask – Was this study published to further an agenda other than make a contribution to science?
If so, does this study also represent a failure of the peer review process? Were the reviewers even interested in advancing science?
http://surfaceyourrealself.com/2015/02/01/problematic-research-with-telomere-length-surfaceyourrealself/