How Long Will I Live?

  There are several ways to know about how long we will live.  First, if you drink and smoke a lot it won’t be very long.  If you do a genetic test you will get an idea, but also a very good way is to measure your telomeres.  These are the ends of the chromosomes which, if you expect to  lead a long life the telomeres need to be long.  The shorter they are the shorter the life, in general.  And the real question is what is their function and why do they get shorter and therefore shorten our lives.

  Lifelong stress will shorten your telomeres, which shorten under stress or adversity.  Telomeres  form the ends of the chromosome that shorten under chronic financial problems, long-term care of  a loved one, emotional neglect and being unloved,  including getting divorced, or suffering chronic anxiety.  It is one way that anxiety kills.  It is that chronic stress indicates a system-wide problem that is expressed in telomere length.  The key ingredient for this is long-term stress resulting from more rapid DNA replication.  And the key ingredient, then, is imprinted stress that causes rapid DNA turnover; generally the earlier it begins the more deleterious it is because unavoidable stress is deadly.  Living in the womb is about as helpless as we get.

  Of course what stress does is ramp up levels of cortisol, the stress hormone that work in see-saw fashion with telomere length.  The higher the cortisol the shorter telomeres will be, in the long run.  When we couple higher cortisol, shorter telomeres together  with higher body temperature  and elevated blood pressure we have an index of a shorter life.  Fortunately, there is something we can do about it since we do lower vitals after one year of our therapy; body temp is on average one degree less and blood pressure in hypertensives are 24 points lower.  We have not as yet done telomere studies.

  There have been studies on healthy adults who started in life in an institution; they had radically lower telomere  lengths. (see Nature.  Vol 490.  Oct 11, 2012).  More important, mothers who underwent severe stress while they were carrying (death of loved one) had offspring with lower than average telomeres.  I have not seen studies on telomere length in those with adverse gestational lives but we plan to do it.  Particularly, we want to study imprinted stress that continues in our system long after the very early trauma.    We must never neglect the imprint; it is the way we  engrave experience in the total system.  A person can claim that he had a wonderful childhood but if his telomere length is shorter than average we need to examine him more carefully.    When we have shorter telomeres we can expect that the person will be more vulnerable to such diseases as diabetes  and heart problems.  The shorter length individuals are much more likely to develop cancer, by the way.  And dementia is another great likelihood.  Can you die from neurosis?  (chronic imprinted stress). Absolutely.  Can you suffer from premature serious illness?  Yes, Yes.  Can we avoid it? Yes, yes.  Take out the pain.  It’s the pain, my friends.  Take it out and there will be far less smoking, drinking  and drug taking, and therefore, longer telomeres.  It is the telomere that are shouting out the pain in their own way,    We need to listen.  And we need to talk back to them in their own language—physiology.  And we need to say, hang on, friend, we will take your pain away, even if you do not know it is there.