picture taken from i09.com
Important safety note to those of you who are expecting to be new dads. According to this article, children born from women who are stressed out during pregnancy have shorter telomeres which is an indication of accelerated aging.
Telomeres are the strands of DNA that make up the endings and caps to your chromosomes, and their length is a good indicator for how long a person can live and how probable it is they would be subject to age-related diseases and effects. In general, the longer the telomere the better. It’s actually a subject of both cancer and longevity research – the former trying to figure out why cancer cells have self-repairing telomeres, and the latter trying to figure out how to repair them in normal humans.
Anyway, what the article says is that children who are born of women who were very stressed out during their pregnancy have a tendency to have telomeres that are those of someone older. For example, a 25 year old whose mother had been stressed out (for whatever reason) while bearing him may have telomeres of someone that’s 30 years old.
So. For us Dads, this is yet another reason why we need to be nicer to our women while they are pregnant. Refer to my crib notes on some ways to do this in concrete ways. A man’s job is never done…
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