High Functioning Centenarians Have Longer Telomeres, More Telomerase Activity, and Better Measures of Immune Function

Today I'll point out an open access paper in which the authors divide centenarians into two groups based on the degree of age-related dysfunction. They find that centenarians with comparatively lower levels of dysfunction also have longer telomere length and more telomerase activity in white blood cells taken from a blood sample. Further, aspects of their immune response that are not directly related to telomeres and telomerase also appear more capable. In one sense this telomere length data is the expected result: telomere length is a measure of biological aging. When considered generally it is a measure of the burden of age-related molecular damage and consequent dysfunction, but when measured in white blood cells it is also to some degree a measure of the decline of the immune system. Less functional centenarians are clearly more physiologically aged than more functional centenarians, and therefore should exhibit shorter average telomere length. On the other hand, telomere length in white blood cells is such a terrible measure of aging that finding no difference between the two groups would also be unsurprising. Over the years, a fair number of comparison studies have failed to find the expected differences in telomere length between study populations of differing health status. Telomere length as it is presently measured only reliably shows correlations with aging over very large study populations, averaging out the large short-term fluctuations resulting fr...
Source: Fight Aging! - Category: Research Authors: Tags: Medicine, Biotech, Research Source Type: blogs