Gene mutations make people grow old

Many people carry a gene variant that takes them several years in their lives.

In the old man's life in two ways. Timing of aging occurs in all cells in our body and is measured in years. However, the speed of biological aging in each body is not the same.

External environmental factors - such as smoking habits, indiscriminate eating, frequent exposure to toxic chemicals - can make the aging process faster.

What plays a key role in the process of biological aging are micro-structures called telomeres. They are located at the end of the chromosomes. Every time a cell divides, the length of the telomeres will decrease a bit. Finally, when short telomeres reach a certain level, the cell will die. Elizabeth Blackburn, a cell biologist with American and Australian citizens who won the Nobel Prize in Medicine last year, likens telomeres to the ends of shoelaces. When the tip of the shoe is broken or splashed, the shoelace starts to fray.

'We found that many individuals carry a special gene variant that makes their telomeres shorter than others,' said Nilesh Samani, a professor at the University of Leicester in England.

According to AFP, Samani and colleagues analyzed more than 500,000 gene variants in the normal human genome and compared those with short telomeres. They found that all people with short telomeres carry a gene variant called TERC, while normal people do not have this variant. A previous study demonstrated that TERC accelerates aging in mice.

The shorter the telomere is, the more likely it is that people will suffer from diseases related to old age. So the team thinks that people with mutated genes are at higher risk of getting old diseases - like heart disease and some forms of cancer - higher than normal people.

In the paper published by Nature Genetics, scientists claim this is the first time humans have found a gene that plays a direct role in aging.

'Our research shows that some people are genetically programmed to age faster than the rest of humanity. The effect that gene variants cause is equivalent to 3 or 4 years of aging, ' said Professor Tim Spector of King's University in England.