People who live in neighborhoods with high rate of crime, noise, and vandalism, are said to be biologically older by 10 years than those who do not.
University of Pittsburgh School of Nursing assistant professor and lead author Mijung Park conducted a study that aimed to determine the correlation between the quality of neighborhood and cellular health, as per Science Daily.
The study was done in collaboration with research teams in Amsterdam and involved 2,902 subjects participating in the Netherlands Study of Depression and Anxiety. The team scrutinized telomere length in the subjects' white blood cells. They also used neighborhood disorder, crime, and noise to determine the quality of the neighborhoods where the subjects resided.
Findings revealed that people with poor neighborhood quality were considerably shorter that telomeres of those who have good neighborhood environment, as per UPI. Park said that the size of the telomeres can be the cell's response to physical and mental stress triggered by disadvantaged emotional, political, and socio-economic factors.
Park's team concentrated on DNA structures called telomeres. Telomeres are located at the end of chromosomes that protect the DNA strands from damage. In the normal cell division process, telomeres get cropped every time the cell divides because they are not completely copied by enzymatic processes.
The investigators associated the shortening of the telomeres with cellular aging and thought short telomeres are very diminutive to replicate and perform standard cell division. Park added that exposure to biological and psychological stress like cancer, depression, and anxiety speed up shortening of telomeres.