April 20, 2024

Starting ageing even before birth!

It appears like we’re also old before our time as the new study has suggested that means of ageing begins from the womb. During the University of Cambridge study using rats to model pregnancy and fetal development, the researchers also saw that providing mothers with antioxidants in pregnancy meant that their offspring aged slowly in adulthood.

However, the offspring of mothers with lower levels of oxygen from the womb, which, in humans, could be a consequence of smoking while being pregnant or of childbearing at thin air, aged faster in adulthood. Our DNA is ‘written’ onto chromosomes, which humans carry 23 pairs. The ends of each one chromosome are called telomeres and act in the same way to your plastic that binds the ends of shoelaces, preventing the chromosomes from fraying. As our bodies age, these telomeres become shorter and shorter, thus their length can be used as a proxy to measure ageing.

Senior author Dino Giussani said that your research in rats implies that the ageing clock begins ticking prior to i am born and enter this world, that may surprise lots of individuals. Giussani added ‘We already know which our genes get connected to environmental risk factors, like smoking, obesity and loss of focus to boost our chance heart problems, but here we’ve shown which the environment we’re encountered with inside womb may be equally, or higher, crucial in programming a danger of adult-onset coronary disease.’

First author Beth Allison further stated that antioxidants often reduce ageing, but here you go shown in my ballet shoes that providing them with to pregnant mothers can lessen the ageing clock of their offspring. This seems particularly important when there are actually complications together with the pregnancy additionally, the fetus is who don’t have oxygen. Of course this discovery was discovered using rats, it suggests a way that we may treat similar problems in humans. Case study is published in The FASEB Journal.