By punishing a child, we shorten his life.

Scientists have established a link between child abuse and the rate of reduction in the length of telomere regions of chromosomes.

Physical trauma in childhood affects not only a person’s subsequent psychological development, but also their genetics. Researchers from the Duke Institute (United States) report in the journal Molecular Psychiatry that childhood stress associated with family violence shortens chromosomal telomeres faster. Telomeres are the end sections of chromosomes that perform a protective function: they prevent damage and loss of genes during division. Molecular machines that copy DNA do not read it to the end, and therefore, with each cell division, some of the end genes would inevitably be lost. But this does not happen, because there are telomeres. They say that the life cycle of a cell depends on their length: the shorter the telomeres, the shorter the cell will live. Ultimately, defects capture the semantic DNA, and the cell dies.

Scientists believe that shortening of telomeres leads to a variety of diseases, from chronic fatigue syndrome to diabetes and dementia. It is also believed that stress can accelerate this process and, therefore, reduce life expectancy. (Here we can recall a recent study devoted to the relationship between the social status of an inhabitant of our planet and the length of his telomeres.) However, there is no unambiguous information here: some scientists claim that the state of telomeres can be used to judge probable health problems, while others, on the contrary, say that there is practically no connection. There is also no absolute clarity about how environmental conditions have a significant impact on telomeres. Almost all researchers have tried to answer the question of whether there is a relationship between the rate of telomere shortening and stress in childhood. But all these studies by scientists relied on people's childhood memories, and therefore the results obtained could not be considered absolutely reliable.

This time, the scientists decided to track the fate of telomeres simultaneously with the development of the child. They decided to use data from a large-scale study conducted in England and aimed to compare environmental risks with genetic changes; in total, 1,100 pairs of twins took part in this project. For the telomere study, 236 children were selected, 50% of whom were subjected to violence to some degree. DNA testing of blood samples taken at the age of 5 and 10 showed that the subjects with adverse childhoods had shorter telomeres, so their genes were copied fewer times. Moreover, the stronger the stress in childhood (roughly speaking, the more the child was beaten as a child), the shorter the telomeres.

Scientists emphasize that they considered physical violence specifically as a source of stress. In other words, it can be said that slaps on the back of the head and "father's belt" reduce a person's life expectancy. But there is a peculiarity here: scientists studied several blood samples taken from children under 5 years old, and it turns out that stress at an early age does not contribute to the shortening of telomeres, but to their lengthening. However, this effect is so strange that the scientists themselves preferred to write it off as errors in the study. In the future, scientists are going to continue working with the same material. First of all, everyone is interested in what will happen to telomeres after children become adults: will the shortening of telomeres slow down when a person leaves a negative environment? And secondly, it is important to find out what the health effects of telomere reduction are (and will there be any at all)