The secret of eternal youth? Give your DNA a workout!
23.05.11
A blood test costing £400 that can reveal how long you will live is going on sale later this year, the Mail reported last week. The test works by checking on the length of your telomeres.
‘My what?’ would be your probable response. Well, telomeres are the new buzzword in medicine. Like the plastic ends on shoelaces, they slow down and protect your strands of DNA against wear and tear. So the longer your telomeres, the better you will age.
Our DNA sits in the middle of each cell in the body, held in
sausage-like tubes. Our cells are constantly dividing, and every time
this happens a tiny nick is taken off the end of each sausage. These
ends are the telomeres.
Without the buffer of the telomere,
every time a cell divided it would lose fragments of DNA at the ends, so
the new pair of cells would be faulty. The problem is that from the
moment we’re conceived, our telomeres start shortening. It’s a process
that continues through
Source: Daily Mail