Joe Marchant
Can meditation slow down the aging process of our body? A BBC Future correspondent
talks about a Nobel Prize winner who approached this spiritual practice from a scientific point of view.
Seven in the morning, Santa Monica Beach in California. A few meters from the water’s edge, there is a small group of people sitting cross–legged. They will spend the next hour in silence as the meditation of the local Buddhist community begins.
Such spiritual practices may seem infinitely far from biomedical research, where the focus is on molecular processes and reproducible results. Scientists from the nearby University of California, San Francisco, are ready to argue with this statement.
Their leader, Nobel laureate Elizabeth Blackburn, has always been interested in how living things work. In the late 1970s, Blackburn, along with biologist Joe Gall from Yale University, sequenced the end sections of the chromosomes of the single-celled organism tetragymena and discovered repeating sequences of letters of the genetic code, which they called telomeres. Telomeres protect the genetic code from information loss during copying, shortening with each division. As it turned out, human chromosomes also have these “protective caps”.
In the 1980s, Elizabeth Blackburn, along with graduate student Carol Greider, discovered the enzyme telomerase, which protects and repairs telomeres. Despite its effect, our telomeres shorten over time, as a result of which cells lose their ability to divide – this phenomenon is called the most important engine of the aging process. The discovery of telomeres and telomerase subsequently earned Blackburn the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.
In 2000, a woman came to her, a conversation with whom radically changed the direction of Blackburn’s research. The visitor’s name was Elissa Epel, and after defending her doctoral thesis, she worked at the Department of Psychiatry at the University of California, San Francisco. She was interested in the damage that chronic stress causes to the body.
According to Epel, the two people who had the greatest influence on her work were Deepak Chopra, an American doctor, writer and adept of alternative medicine, and Hans Selye, an innovative biologist who first studied chronic diseases in stressed rats in the 1930s. “Every stress leaves behind an indelible scar, and the body has to pay for survival after a stressful situation with its aging,” Selye said.
In 2000, Epel wanted to find this scar. After reading about Blackburn’s work, she decided that maybe this was what she needed.
“You won’t believe it!”
Worried, Elissa Epel asked Elizabeth Blackburn to help her with a study that targeted mothers in one of the most stressful situations, from her point of view, when they are forced to take care of their chronically ill child.
According to the Epel plan, the researchers first had to ask the women how stressful they considered their condition to be, and then try to establish a link between their mental state and their telomeres. The measurement of telomere length was taken over by scientists from the University of Utah, and the telomerase level was set by the Blackburn research group.
“It was a completely different world for me,” recalls Blackburn. However, being a mother herself, Elizabeth could not help but sympathize with women who found themselves in a similar situation, and she was attracted by the idea of understanding what was happening.
But it wasn’t until four years later that they were finally ready to take blood samples from 58 women (it was a small pilot project). Epel was very meticulous about the selection of subjects, however, Blackburn continued to consider the project more of a test project – right up to the moment when Epel called her and said: “You won’t believe it!”
The results of the study left no doubt. The more stressful the mothers described their condition, the shorter their telomeres were and the lower their telomerase levels.
“I was intrigued,” says Blackburn. Together with Epel, they discovered the relationship of real life and human experience with the molecular mechanisms inside cells. The first evidence has emerged that stress doesn’t just harm our health-it literally makes us older.
The shorter the telomeres, the worse the health.
When the study was finally published in the official journal of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA in December 2004, there was a lot of press coverage about it, and the work received positive feedback.
However, many telomere researchers were initially skeptical of her results. According to them, the scope of the study was limited, and the accuracy of telomere length testing also raised questions.
Nevertheless, the work of Blackburn and Epel provoked a rapid development of research in this direction. Thus, scientists were able to find the relationship between stress and telomere shortening in healthy women, in caregivers of people suffering from Alzheimer’s disease, in victims of domestic violence and childhood trauma, as well as in people with major depression and post-traumatic stress disorder. “Ten years later, I have no doubt that the environment has a definite effect on telomere length,” says Mary Armanios, a clinical geneticist at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine who specializes in the study of telomere dysfunction.
In addition, progress has been made in describing the mechanism of this relationship. Laboratory studies show that the stress hormone cortisol reduces telomerase activity, and oxidative stress (damage to the body due to the occurrence of oxidative reactions uncharacteristic of its own metabolism) and inflammation (a physiological consequence of psychological stress) seem to directly destroy telomeres.
It seems to have a detrimental effect on our health. Telomere shortening provokes the development of various age-related diseases, including osteoarthritis, diabetes, obesity, cardiovascular diseases, Alzheimer’s disease and stroke.
As there are more and more confirmed cases of damage associated with the destruction of telomeres, Elizabeth Blackburn seeks to solve a new problem – how to protect telomeres from the negative effects of the environment.
Meditation teaches us to appreciate the present
“If you had told me ten years ago that meditation was going to be one of the areas of my work, I would have decided that one of us was definitely crazy,” Blackburn told a New York Times reporter in 2007. Collaboration with researchers around the world has shown that physical exercise, healthy eating, and social support help combat telomere shortening. However, one of the most effective methods, presumably slowing down the destruction of telomeres – and possibly contributing to their lengthening – turned out to be meditation.
There are few studies so far, but the results are similar. As part of one of them, the participants went to meditate at the Buddhist retreat “Shambhala” in the mountains in the north of the American state of Colorado. Those who completed a three-month meditation course had 30% higher telomerase levels than members of a similar group awaiting such a trip.
Another study involved people caring for dementia patients: for eight weeks, 12 minutes a day, volunteers practiced the ancient Kirtan Kriya meditation, during which a mantra is intoned. As a result, their telomerase activity became much higher than that of the control group, whose participants simply listened to relaxing music.
Finally, another study was conducted in a group of men with a low risk of prostate cancer. These men radically changed their lifestyle (including meditation in their schedule) and were able to maintain telomerase activity at a higher level than the members of the control group, and after five years their telomeres turned out to be slightly longer.
There are various theories explaining the supposed beneficial effects of meditation on telomerase and telomeres. According to the main one, meditation reduces stress. This practice involves slow, rhythmic breathing, which promotes physical relaxation by removing the standard “fight or flight– stress response. Meditation probably helps to relieve psychological stress. The opportunity to detach ourselves from unpleasant, heavy thoughts allows us to understand that they do not necessarily reproduce reality in its entirety and eventually pass away. We begin to appreciate the present more instead of constantly worrying about the past or worrying about the future.
“Paying conscious attention to your actions and interactions with other people is very important, but it’s so rare now because we constantly need to switch from one thing to another,” says Elissa Epel. “I think absent-minded attention is typical of modern society as a whole.”
When a Nobel Prize winner starts talking about meditation, it can’t help but annoy many people. However, in general, Blackburn’s methodological approach to the study of this topic has aroused poorly concealed admiration even among those who are not inclined to trust alternative medicine.
“It’s easy to get confused”
Her work also has critics. Oncologist surgeon David Gorsky, known for his rejection of alternative medicine and pseudoscience, runs a blog under the pseudonym Orac. Without calling for a complete abandonment of scientific research on meditation, Gorski expresses concern that the preliminary results of such research may be given too much importance. “It’s very easy to get confused,” he says. “Nobel laureates can make mistakes too.” Elizabeth Blackburn’s biochemist colleagues also disagree when it comes to her interest in meditation.
“The idea of meditation makes people uncomfortable,” Blackburn notes. She sees the reason for this reaction in the fact that meditation is relatively uncommon and is often associated with religious practices.
But the situation is changing before our eyes. Partially relying on financial support from the US National Institutes of Health, the researchers were able to develop non-religious techniques, including stress relief through meditative concentration and mindfulness-based cognitive therapy. It is reported that as a result of their use, a number of health benefits are achieved – from lowering blood pressure and strengthening immunity to combating depression. In addition, several neurobiological studies have shown that even short courses of meditation can trigger structural changes in the brain.
Elizabeth Blackburn herself believes that meditation research is justified if serious methods are used. She also tried to meditate by going to a six-day intensive seminar in Santa Barbara. “I was thrilled,” says Blackburn. Sometimes she resorts to a short meditation to concentrate and stop being distracted. And the epigraph to her recent article was a quote from the Buddha: “The secret to the health of both mind and body is not to grieve about the past and not worry about the future, but to live in the present wisely and honestly.”
Find out the length of your telomeres
Blackburn is not inclined to delve into the spiritual side of meditation. “I have a solid foothold in the material world,” she says.
Traditional tests give us an idea of what diseases we are at risk of. For example, high cholesterol levels can signal cardiovascular disorders, and high blood sugar levels indicate diabetes.
Telomere length, on the other hand, gives a general idea of our health and our biological age. And although we already know that we need to exercise, eat right and reduce stress, many neglect this.
According to Blackburn, when we know the exact numbers about our health, it’s easier for us to change our behavior. The results of a new study conducted in collaboration with Epel showed that the volunteers who were informed of their telomere length led a healthier lifestyle over the next year than the participants in the control group who remained in the dark.
The politicians did not heed the scientists’ call
Scientists see their global task in drawing the attention of governments of different countries to the problem of telomeres.
There is a growing number of studies according to which stress has an extremely detrimental effect on the condition of our “protective caps”. In particular, shorter telomeres are found in people who have not graduated from school or live in an atmosphere of brutality and violence, in a risk group, and in those who work shifts, live in disadvantaged areas and in unfavorable environmental conditions.
The risk is especially high for children: early psychological or physical abuse leads to a shortening of telomeres for life. The stress that women experience during pregnancy is also transmitted through telomeres, causing health problems for the next generation.
In one of their 2012 publications, Blackburn and Epel urged policy makers to prioritize reducing social stress. This appeal did not receive a serious response.
It seems that most scientists and politicians are still not ready to bridge the interdisciplinary gap that Blackburn and Epel bridged a decade ago.
/ BBC Future./
