Katri Savolainen from the Developmental Psychology Group is defending her PhD thesis Stress and cellular aging – Associations between stress-related factors and leukocyte telomere length this Wednesday.
It’s well established that stress can be harmful for one’s health, but the mechanisms linking stress with disease and early mortality are not fully understood. Katri worked on the Helsinki Birth Cohort Study, which comprises the 13,345 individuals born from 1934 to 1944 in Helsinki, Finland. Of this cohort, a random sample were invited to a clinical visit some ten years ago. These participants gave a blood sample, and from those blood cells we were able to study telomere length: the length of those bits of DNA which can be found at the end of chromosomes, that get shorter as the cell divides and seem associated with many aging-related diseases, such as cardiovascular diseases, stroke, and type 2 diabetes. It’s been suggested previously that stress could link to these illnesses through shortened telomere length.
In her thesis, Katri was able to show that contrary to what one would expect, personality dimensions, mental disorders, depressive symptoms, traumatic life events or stress reactivity – the way your individual hormonal system responds to a stressful situation – were largely unrelated to telomere length. However, those individuals who suffered the double burden of traumatic experience both early and later on in life, and those who had sleep apnea, did on average show shorter telomere length. In conclusion, it would seem that this wide array of stress-related factors are not associated with telomere length.
Read more about Katri’s research in Finnish, have a look at her thesis online, or come watch Katri defend her thesis on November 16th, at noon, at the University of Helsinki main building, lecture room 12 (Fabianinkatu 33)!
/Sara Sammallahti