Scientists Find Alarming Deterioration In DNA Of The Urban Poor

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  • Race-Ethnicity, Poverty, Urban Stressors, and Telomere Length in a Detroit Community-based Sample
    http://hsb.sagepub.com/content/early/2015/04/30/0022146515582100.full.pdf

    Scientists Find Alarming Deterioration In DNA Of The Urban Poor
    http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/05/08/poverty-race-ethnicity-dna-telomeres_n_7228530.html

    Researchers analyzed telomeres of poor and lower middle-class black, white, and Mexican residents of Detroit. Telomeres are tiny caps at the ends of DNA strands, akin to the plastic caps at the end of shoelaces, that protect cells from aging prematurely. Telomeres naturally shorten as people age. But various types of intense chronic stress are believed to cause telomeres to shorten, and short telomeres are associated with an array of serious ailments including cancer, diabetes, and heart disease.

    Evidence increasingly points to telomere length being highly predictive of healthy life expectancy. Put simply, “the shorter your telomeres, the greater your chance of dying.”

    The new study found that low-income residents of Detroit, regardless of race, have significantly shorter telomeres than the national average. “There are effects of living in high-poverty, racially segregated neighborhoods — the life experiences people have, the physical exposures, a whole range of things — that are just not good for your health,” Geronimus said in an interview with The Huffington Post.

    But within this group of Detroit residents, the ways in which race-ethnicity and income were associated with telomere length were strikingly varied.

    #santé #épigénétique