Peek Inside Cells May
Foretell Future Death Risk
Excerpt By Alison McCook, Reuters Health

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Buried deep within our cells lies a "molecular clock" that seems to hold at least some clue to the risk of dying, researchers announced Friday. For the first time, they have found that the "clock" predicted how likely people over 60 were to die from certain diseases linked to old age.

Dr. Richard M. Cawthon and his colleagues at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City discovered that initially healthy people older than 60 with shorter telomeres--snippets of genetic material that cap chromosomes--are more likely to die than people of the same age with longer caps at the end of the chromosomes, which are long strings of coiled DNA found in cells.

These findings, published in the February 1 issue of the British journal, The Lancet, suggest that it may one day be possible to increase lifespan in healthy people by keeping their telomeres long and healthy, Cawthon told Reuters Health.

In general, researchers have discovered that a variety of conditions appear to be linked to a shortening of these telomeres--a normal process of aging.

Researchers may one day discover that eating fruits and vegetables or consuming antioxidants could maintain the length of telomeres, Cawthon suggested. In addition, investigators could develop more radical treatments that boost levels of the proteins that maintain telomeres in cells, he added.

The test to measure the length of a person's telomeres is "very simple and cheap," Cawthon said. However, even if the test were widely available, Cawthon predicted that doctors would hesitate to offer it to patients if they were still unable to use the information it provides to help patients.

"Why be finding out about something like this if there's nothing you can do?" Cawthon asked.

During the current study, Cawthon and his colleagues measured telomere length in 143 people between 60 and 97 who had donated blood during the 1980s, and noted which participants had developed heart disease or infectious disease.

The researchers found that people with shorter telomeres were more likely to die than were their peers with longer telomeres, largely due to heart disease and infectious disease, both of which tend to be more deadly in the elderly.

Specifically, those with shorter telomeres were more than 3 times as likely as their peers to die of heart disease, and showed more than 8-fold the risk of death from infectious disease.

In an interview, Cawthon said that he believed that the process of telomere shortening "is a fundamental process of senescence."

These caps at the end of chromosomes shorten each time a cell divides, he explained, and the longer a cell is alive, the more times it will divide. Normal bodily wear and tear, or oxidative stress, can also shorten these structures, he added.

Once telomeres become too short, Cawthon said, cells may essentially commit suicide. Over time, this process can deplete the body of the cells it needs to thrive, he noted.

SOURCE: The Lancet 2003;361:393-395.

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