Later-life illness due to stress
By Liz Lockhart
Researchers from the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) suggest that the anticipation of future 
events may contribute to stress-related increased risk of age-related diseases.
Anticipation itself can be useful when making future plans and controlling our lives but if we feel threatened by future events this can cause the problems.
The researchers studied 50 women, of whom about half cared for relatives with dementia. They found that the participants who felt most threatened by anticipating stressful future events had more signs of aging.
This aging is on a cellular level and was assessed by measuring telomeres. Telomeres are protective caps which are found on the ends of chromosomes. A short telomere index indicated older cellular age. This is linked to an increase in the risk of several age-related diseases such as cancer, stroke and heart disease.
Elizza Epel, PhD., an associate professor in the UCSF Department of Psychiatry was the lead investigator on this study. Epel said ‘We are getting closer to understanding how chronic stress translates into the present moment. As stress researchers, we try to examine the psychological process of how people respond to a stressful event and how that impacts their neurobiology and cellular health. And we’re making some strides in that.’
The type of stressful activity used to measure these participants stress reaction were events such as public speaking and maths exams. It was found that caregivers tend to anticipate more threat than non-caregivers when asked to perform stressful activities.
This kind of anticipation increased the risk for short telomeres. The researchers suggest that, for severely stressed people, this higher level of anticipated threat, when experienced in everyday life, can bring an increase in cellular aging.
Aoife O’Donovan, the study’s lead author said ‘How you respond to a brief stressful experience in the laboratory may reveal a lot about how you respond to stressful experiences in your daily life. Our findings are preliminary for now, but they suggest that the major forms of stress in your life may influence how you 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 of disease in stressed individuals. We now have preliminary evidence that higher anticipatory threat perception may be one such mechanism.’
