Even cells from people who weren’t even born, but were conceived during the Great Depression, later showed signs of more rapid aging.
Children born during the Great Depression of the interwar period (1929-1939), the worst in modern history, show the consequences imprinted in their DNA and cells to this day, in the form of biomarkers of faster aging, a US scientific study shows.
The Great Depression, which left up to a quarter of the US workforce unemployed, appears to have had a biological impact on how people age. The scientists found that the cells of even people who weren’t even born, but were conceived during the Great Depression, later showed signs of more rapid aging.
The study, led by Lorin Schmitz of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, which was published in the journal of the US National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), according to “Nature”, was based on the recording of changes in the so-called epigenome of cells, that is to group of chemical markers attached to DNA that influence when, where, and how genes will be expressed in each cell.
Previous studies have shown that the experience of economic and other serious crises by humans (wars, famine, epidemics, pollution, etc.), which result in great stress during the initial stages of human development, even in the embryo stage, it can affect his health for decades afterwards. Major historical events leave an imprint on the epigenome and by extension affect the human genome itself.
The new study shows that the impact of the Great Recession is still visible in the bodies of very old people, and that, as Patrick Allard of the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), said, “is definitely something that will be in the textbooks at some point.”
An embryo receives from its parents the genetic instructions for its development, but along the way a series of factors (environment, nutrition, hormones, etc.) exert their own epigenetic influence that significantly affects whether and how the cells will perform their genetic potential. These effects, as the new research shows, can last a lifetime.
Comparing aging biomarkers in 832 people born during the 1930s, it was found that those born in those states that had been hit hardest by the Depression (unemployment and wage declines were greatest) were the ones whose cells they looked older. The cells were significantly younger in people born in areas of the US that had been spared the worst of the Great Depression.
The researchers admitted that it is difficult to determine the exact biological mechanisms by which a severe recession imprints itself on the body and ages it an hour earlier.
RES-EMP
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