A Quote by Elizabeth Blackburn
The conservative statement is that telomere length is a biomarker, but it's probably not passive. There are some very intimate relationships between things such as molecular markers for inflammation and telomere health.
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The goal is to learn more about telomere length and other markers of ageing, how best to measure these markers, how they are related to health and lifestyle, and how people respond to learning their own telomere length results.
Checking your telomere length is a bit like weighing yourself: you get this single number which depends on a lot of factors. Telomere length gives a sense of your underlying health.
We can detect very small differences in telomere length, and it is a very simple and fast technique where many samples can be analysed at the same time. Most importantly, we are able to determine the presence of dangerous telomeres - those that are very short.
We are using both visual biomarkers, MRI and a panel of blood and tissue testing including work on telomere length with Spectracell and Life Length and epigenetic testing.
We and other groups are seeing clear statistical links between telomere shortness and risk for a variety of diseases that are becoming very common, such as cardiovascular disease, diabetes and certain cancers.
Medicine has been successful by treating diseases in a very specific way once the damage is done. But telomere length integrates a lot of factors together and gives you an overall picture of risk for what is now emerging as a lot of diseases that tend to occur together, such as diabetes and heart disease.
We still don't know what evolutionary significance to attach to it, but it is at the very least interesting that a telomere gene is related to obesity.
We have a battery of tests planned at regular intervals including DNA methylation analysis, gene expression profile changes, telomere length (both TAT and QTRAP measured) and various other metrics that will highlight positive changes to aging biomarkers.
What is it that keeps you so interested in the telomere? It's so intricate and complicated, and you want to know how it works.
A short telomere represents a persistent and non-repairable damage to the cells, which is able to prevent their division or regeneration.
If a test showed you had telomere shortening, it would be a red flag suggesting you should take a look at possible risk factors.
Observational studies show that exercise, nutritional supplements and reducing psychological stress can help. Chronic high stress and smoking can lead to accelerated telomere shortening.
We're collecting about 100,000 telomere lengths in saliva samples and then looking at how those relate to both the extensive longitudinal clinical records that Kaiser is collecting and the genome sequence variations.
We see that mice that undergo caloric restriction show a lower telomere shortening rate than those fed with a normal diet. These mice therefore have longer telomeres as adults, as well as lower rates of chromosome anomalies.
Molecular genetics can show off some surprising relationships like, for example, the close relationship of whales to hippopotamuses, which I think nobody ever guessed until molecular data was looked at. The closest relatives of whales are hippopotamuses, even closer than any other cloven-hoofed animals.
Once you digitize data, you can actually analyze patterns and relationships in geographic space - relationships between certain health patterns and air or water pollution, between plants and climate, soils, landscape.
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