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Being obese can age people by up to nine years - while smokers look four-and-a-half years older than they really are, a new study shows. And getting through 20 cigarettes a day for 40 years can put almost seven-and-a-half years on you, the researchers found. Obesity and smoking are important risk factors for many age-related diseases but it is the first time they have been found to make people "biologically older". Professor Tim Spector and colleagues looked for evidence of ageing at a molecular level by analysing 'telomeres' which cap the ends of cell chromosomes and protect them from damage. Prof Spector, of St Thomas' Hospital, London, said: "Our findings suggest obesity and cigarette smoking accelerate human ageing. The difference in telomere length between being lean and being obese corresponds to 8·8 years of ageing. "Smoking, previous or current, corresponds on average to 4·6 years of ageing. And smoking a pack per day for 40 years corresponds to 7·4 years of ageing. "Our results emphasise the potential wide-ranging effects of the two most important preventable exposures in developed countries — cigarettes and obesity." Every time a cell divides - and as people age - their telomeres get shorter. The researchers whose findings are published online by The Lancet recruited 1,122 women [- 561 pairs of twins - from the UK aged between 18 and 76. The women were from the TwinsUK Adult Twin Registry - a group previously developed to study the heritability and genetics of diseases with a higher prevalence among women. In the study 119 of them were obese - with a body mass index (BMI) greater than 30 - and 85 women had a BMI under 20. The participants were also asked to complete a questionnaire on their smoking history and 531 had never smoked, 369 were ex-smokers and 203 were current smokers. Their exposure to smoking was measured as pack-years - the number of cigarette packs smoked per day and the number of years spent smoking. The investigators measured the concentrations of a body fat regulator called leptin and telomere length in blood samples from the women. They found telomere length decreased steadily with age and the telomeres of obese women and smokers were much shorter that those of lean women and never-smokers. Lean individuals had significantly longer telomeres than women with mid-range BMIs who in turn had longer telomeres than obese individuals |
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An apple is better for you than a donut
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