Early on in the TV show “American Idol,” contestants are required to form teams and arrange and choreograph in the course of a single night. Immediately after performing the next day, the group hears the judges’ decisions on whether any of them will individually move on to the next round. The stress levels during this 24-hour period are understandably high, and contestants have collapsed as a result.
Despite the health scares and arguments showcased in these TV episodes, a study from American researchers suggests that the stress endured by the contestants during this short period arguably can’t compare to the levels of stress endured by those who do make it through this one round and then keep trying to continue on each week toward the finale. The chronic stress, the researchers suggested, is a risk factor for diseases linked to aging and could start at the cellular level.
“The anticipation of threat may be the most enduring form of psychological stress because people can perceive and worry about psychological threats that are in the far-distant future,” the team wrote. Against this background of constant stress, they added, everyday stressors such as misplacing keys or a phone would be magnified and, “would in turn lead to repeated and prolonged activation of harmful biological stress responses, which could promote cellular aging in chronically stressed humans.”
Comparison
To test this theory, the team of researchers compared the telomeres of several dozen women who spent several hours of each day caring for a relative with dementia against telomeres from a control group of women who were not exposed to chronic stress.
Telomeres are repeated bits of DNA that cap each end of a chromosome and protect them from damage. Picture a child wearing a cap on a windy day. Without his cap, the child’s hair might fly in all directions because of the wind. With his cap on, his hair stays in place.
Humans have 23 pairs of chromosomes that contain a person’s genetic information. Damage to any part of a chromosome could lead to diseases such as cancer, or conditions such as Crohn disease, which affects the lining of the digestive tract. In 2009, the Nobel Prize in Medicine went to three American researchers who discovered how telomeres protect chromosome ends and how telomeres are made. Elizabeth Blackburn, one of these three Nobel laureates, coauthored the current study on how telomere lengths might be associated with aging at the cellular level.
Anticipated stress
“The present data indicate that anticipated threat is more strongly associated with short telomere length than threat reported retrospectively about experiences during a stressor,” wrote Blackburn and her colleagues in their report. “While the experience and recall of stressful events is constrained by perception and memory of those events, there are no such constraints on anticipated stressors.”
The team acknowledged that further work is needed to back up the associations they’ve laid out in this “first demonstration” between chronic stress, telomere length and aging. “Our findings are preliminary for now,” said study lead author Aoife O’Donovan in a statement, “but they suggest that the major forms of stress in your life may influence how your respond to more minor forms of stress, such as losing your keys, getting stuck in traffic or leading a meeting at work. Our goal is to gain better understanding of how psychological stress promotes biological aging so that we can design targeted interventions that reduce risk for disease in stressed individuals.”
The study was published ahead online Jan. 24 and will appear in print in the May issue of the journal “Brain, Behavior and Immunity.”
E-mail the author at massie@massie.com.