Punishing a child, we shorten his life
Last reviewed: 16.10.2021
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Scientists have established the relationship between child abuse and the rate of contraction of the length of the telomere regions of chromosomes.
Physical trauma in childhood affects not only the further psychological development of a person, they affect its genetics. Researchers at the Duke Institute (United States) inform Molecular Psychiatry that childhood stress, coupled with family violence, shortens the chromosome telomeres faster. Telomeres are the end sections of chromosomes, performing a protective function: they do not allow damage and loss of genes during division. Molecular machines that copy DNA do not read it to the end, and therefore with each division of the cell part of the terminal genes would inevitably be lost. But this does not happen, because there are telomeres. They say that the length of the cell's life cycle depends on the length: the shorter the telomeres, the less the cell will live. Ultimately, defects capture semantic DNA, and the cell dies.
Scientists believe that the shortening of telomeres leads to a variety of diseases, from chronic fatigue syndrome to diabetes mellitus and dementia. It is also considered that stress can accelerate this process and consequently reduce the life span. (Here you can remember not so long ago the work on the relationship of the social status of a resident of our planet with the length of his telomeres.) However, there is no unambiguous information: some scientists state that telomere can be used to judge probable health problems, while others say , that practically no connection exists. There is no ultimate clarity in how environmental conditions have a big impact on telomeres. Almost all researchers have tried to answer the question of whether there is a correlation between the rate of telomere shortening and stress in childhood. But all these works of scientists were based on children's memories of people, and therefore the results could not be considered unquestionably reliable.
This time, scientists decided to follow the fate of telomeres at the same time as the development of the child. They decided to use the data of a large-scale study that was conducted in England and aimed to compare environmental risks with genetic changes; In total, 1,100 pairs of twins participated in this project. To study telomeres, 236 children were selected, 50% of whom were somehow subjected to violence. The DNA test from blood samples, which was taken at the age of 5 and 10 years, demonstrated that in experimental subjects with unfavorable childhood telomeres are shorter, therefore their genes are copied fewer times. And the stronger was the stress in childhood (roughly speaking, the more a child was beaten in childhood), the shorter the telomeres were.
Scientists emphasize that as a source of stress, they considered specifically physical violence. In other words, we can say that the backs and "father's belt" reduce the life of a person. But here there is a special feature: scientists have studied several blood samples taken from children under 5 years old, and it turns out that stress at an early age contributes not to the shortening of telomeres, but to their elongation. However, this effect is so strange that the scientists themselves preferred to write it off for inaccuracy 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 telomere shortening slow down when a person leaves the negative environment? And secondly, it is important to find out what the results of reducing telomeres for health (and whether they are at all)