What Happens When Telomeres Shorten?
Studies have shown that longer telomeres promote longevity. (FN: learn.genetics.utah.edu). Geneticist Richard Cawthon and his team at the University of Utah found that individuals over 60 years of age with longer telomeres experienced greater heart and immune system health than their age-matched counterparts with short telomeres. A shortened Telomere has been compared to a burning fuse on a bomb. When intact and long, they prevent chromosome ends from fraying and sticking to one another which scrambles an organism’s genetic information. Telomeres that are short and frayed (due to multiple divisions) are the result of stress and the aging process. At birth our blood cells have 8,000 base pairs of Telomeres (the length of one section is made of six base pairs of TTAGGG telomeric DNA). As we grow and age many of our cells are continually dividing. On the average we lose about 50 base pairs per year, except in areas of stress, where the loss can be significantly higher. The result is that
