Acute exercise increases expression of telomere protective genes in heart tissue

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28166612

by mhb • 9 years ago

202 82 9 years ago

ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

wslh• 9 years ago

How much exercise this should be in humans?

eganist• 9 years ago

Not yet known; this research was only performed on mice so far.

JshWright• 9 years ago

This study is looking at one specific mechanism by which exercise may be helpful in improving some aspect of your health. It's not especially useful to look at just this study though, as it doesn't actually link to any outcomes (the telomere protective expression may or may not actually reduce your risk for cardiovascular disease).

It's more useful to look at studies that have looked at actual outcomes (e.g. reducing the incidence of heart attack or stroke, etc). In those cases, the bulk of the evidence points to 30 minutes a day, 5 days a week of moderate exercise (e.g. a brisk walk or jog) being the best 'bang for your buck'. There are certainly gains to be made by going beyond that, but the curve falls off pretty sharply, and you can get almost all the (proven) benefits of exercise at that level.

EDIT: I would suggest this YouTube video from Healthcare Triage on the benefits of exercise that are supported by good research: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SFBBjynBpSw

Insanity2• 9 years ago

Do you happen to know if the crucial thing here is "regular" excercise? As in, is it in important to spread out the excercise over the 5 days?

Would doing the 2h30 min excercise over say, 2 or 3 days per week, amount to the same benefit?

rachkovsky• 9 years ago

Thanks a lot for the Healthcare Triage link!

OldSchoolJohnny4• 9 years ago

Literally no way of knowing since they studied MICE not HUMANS. If you want to exercise your mouse though it might be useful...

CodeCube• 9 years ago

The pithy response is of course, "Exercise improves health. In other news, water is wet". But of course that's too simplistic ... this kind of research is awesome. Anything that can help us understand these mechanisms are one step closer to a literal fountain of youth.

untilHellbanned4• 9 years ago

I'd bet any amount of money that this data already exists in some form and so re-inventing the wheel - haha - with this study was not particularly useful. Like the parent comment says, water is wet. When you exercise stuff changes. What most biologists never do is point out all the things that don't change. That's how we'd see how special it is in this case that telomeres change.

untilHellbanned4• 9 years ago

Ok so me-too apps like yet another photo sharing app is not cool, but me-too incremental biomedical research is cool.

Good to know we are all about innovation here.

harveywi• 9 years ago

one step closer to a literal fountain of youth

I think you mean "Literally one step closer to a metaphorical fountain of youth." Or, in other words, the literal journey is literally the reward.

castis• 9 years ago

If, via this research (and heaps of handwaving), we can invent a water fountain that dispenses something that make you live longer. Then we have invented a literal fountain of youth.

eagletusk• 9 years ago

at what point does a word get used so commonly in an incorrect form that it becomes, literally, the new definition?

drzaiusapelord• 9 years ago

Except we also have research the suggests acute exercise raises the risk of adverse CV events[1]. So you just can't assume "Oh if I work super hard then I'll only see benefits." There are liabilities here and understanding balance and what works for you is what's going to matter. Studies like this just draw in the Ray Kurzweil 'live forever' crowd, hence it at the top of HN. They aren't comprehensive and may have nothing to with human health at all and probably don't add anything to our practical knowledge of exercise.

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27017149

http://circ.ahajournals.org/content/115/17/2358

http://www.runnersworld.com/newswire/heart-risk-marathoners-...

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/3298928

jey• 9 years ago

CONCLUSIONS: Exercise acutely increases the risk of adverse CV events, with greater risk associated with vigorous intensity. The risks of an adverse CV event during and immediately after exercise are outweighed by the health benefits of vigorous exercise performed regularly. A key challenge remains the identification of occult structural heart disease and inheritable conditions that increase the chances of lethal arrhythmias during exercise.

serg_chernata2• 9 years ago

For anyone interested, a friendly plug for Dr Rhonda Patrick[1], who podcasts and speaks on nutrition, exercise, aging and telomeres in particular.

1. https://www.foundmyfitness.com/

literallycancer3• 9 years ago

Something about the design of that site makes me immediately suspicious and less likely to listen to anything she has to say.

kortex• 9 years ago

The favicon is an avocado. snert. Yeah I get that exact same vibe too.

0xcde4c3db• 9 years ago

Based on a quick skim she seems more credible than, say, Mehmet Oz (okay, low bar, but bear with me). She seems to have an academic background relevant to the stuff she talks about, and I don't see any obvious sign that she's shilling the usual crap like proprietary supplements, weird exercise equipment/programs, homeopathy, etc..

timdorr2• 9 years ago

I tend to stick to her YouTube channel, podcasts, and Twitter feed. You're right, her website is not doing her any favors. But she's a biologist, not a web developer. Hence, going directly to her content sources seems to be the best option.

ricardonunez• 9 years ago

The first time I heard about her was listening to Tim Ferriss Podcast. She is knowledgeable and know her thing, but I agree her website doesn't inspire trust.

QSIITurbo• 9 years ago

Yuck. Just the normal nutrition crap with no real studies to back up the claims. The biochemistry may be sound to a point but the conclusions about ageing and positive health effects of "x, y, and z" are there on the hyperbole. Zero respectable publications where they show that people with "diet x" are healthier than the average population.

serg_chernata2• 9 years ago

I wouldn't be so sure, she names plenty of studies. Don't be so quick to judge.

OldSchoolJohnny4• 9 years ago

Yikes, so not only is it poor quality research but they are shilling for commercial stuff?

StClaire• 9 years ago

How would we check these results in humans? Can we safely biopsy someone's heart?

untilHellbanned4• 9 years ago

no. more practical to use proxies (this is the hard part) from more readily available tissues like the blood.

forgotpwagain• 9 years ago

biopsies of the heart can be done, but only for compelling reasons. it carries non-trivial risk to the individual.

untilHellbanned described the better way -- ideally, there would be some sort of biomarker in the blood that serves as a proxy for the level in the heart. But how do you find it and validate it? It's challenging (at best...)

gozur88• 9 years ago

I would think for research purposes autopsies would give you better data than biopsies, and without any risk.

carbocation• 9 years ago

It is hard for me to understand why a mouse study in a low-impact journal is at the top of HN.

The article does not appropriately adjust for multiple testing, and therefore none of its claims are well supported except the JNK2 decrease in post-exercise mice.

Full article is available at http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/store/10.1113/EP086189/asset/...

droopyEyelids• 9 years ago

Looking at this article, and the one about the supposed use of falcons as anti-drone measures, makes me think about the whole "fake news" thing.

Something about how this is the quality of material we choose to promote among ourselves, the need for a critical eye when analyzing news, and how spreading fake stuff must be like shooting fish in a barrel.

Not the most joyful thoughts to start a morning!

kgarten5• 9 years ago

Don't understand the downvotes. I had similar feelings (I remember astroturfing articles about how safe nuclear power is after the Fukushima incident on the top of HN).

cbgb• 9 years ago

For the record, I just read about the use of eagles (not falcons, though they are kept at falconries in France) in combating drones in a daily newsletter I highly respect. Here is the article they cite: http://en.rfi.fr/wire/20170220-born-killers-french-army-groo...

I guess I don't understand how at least the anti-drone eagles can be considered "fake news."

OldSchoolJohnny4• 9 years ago

I don't understand the downvotes; maybe Hacker News isn't for me anymore.

dekhn• 9 years ago

Telomeres have been a nerd snipe (https://xkcd.com/356/) for hackers for as long as (if not longer) than Aubrey DeGrey has been claiming we're all going to live forever.

Short summary: research in this area is interesting, especially if it's done right, but it doesn't mean we have any reliable interventions to increase mortality.

jkdufair• 9 years ago

Ah but we do! Guns, germs, bombs.

acjohnson55• 9 years ago

They had me at "telomere" <3

semi-extrinsic• 9 years ago

Hypothesis: when it comes to "off-topic" (i.e. non-programming) subjects on HN, and especially science, articles are posted with essentially random levels of novelty/importance/truth, and then a random set of individuals drawn from a population of 99.9% non-experts in that particular field upvotes, comments (or not) on each particular story. This implies amount of upvoting is mainly uncorrelated with importance of story.

This could be tested by drawing a sample of N highly rated articles and N non-highly rated articles on both programming and on some other field (say cancer research), having an expert in each field score the articles in each group (highly and non-highly rated) in their field, and then compare the rating distributions for the two fields. According to the above hypothesis, on programming the distribution in the highly-rated group will be more peaked relative to the non-highly-rated articles, than in the other field.

(There probably needs to be some manual de-duplication etc. in the initial selection of the four groups.)

abandonliberty• 9 years ago

Seems like a corollary to the Gell-Mann amnesia effect:

“Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the "wet streets cause rain" stories. Paper's full of them. In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.”

nottorp• 9 years ago

Out of pure curiosity, what does this mean in english?

leereeves• 9 years ago

Telomeres are protective regions of DNA at the end of chromosomes. They get shorter when a cell divides and that shortening is believed to be responsible for some of the symptoms of aging.

This study says exercise causes heart cells to produce more of certain proteins that protect the telomeres (in mice).

The study didn't actually measure telomere lengths or lifespan, but having more of these proteins might prevent telomere shortening and slow cardiac aging.

timdorr2• 9 years ago

Exercise is good for you.

More specifically, intense exercise seems to protect the length of the heart's telomeres, which are the ends of your DNA strands and shorten as you get older. They are linked to the effects of aging, so delaying their shortening would seem to indicate delaying the effects of aging.

mangodrunk• 9 years ago

What does "acute exercise" mean?

jfarlow• 9 years ago

When DNA is copied the machine that does the copying must be already bound to the one of the strands of the two-stranded DNA. Physically, this means that the very first few bases of the DNA do not get copied by the machine, because the first few bases act instead as a 'handle' for the copying machine to grab onto the data. Imagine if you could not simultaneously read and copy the data of a running program, and you wanted to copy the entire running operating system (you cannot shut down a cell) - you'd have to figure out a kind of 'scratch space' to keep a few versions of the copy program that you knew you would lose during they copy operation. Over time, the amount of scratch space reserved for the DNA to use to bootstrap its copying decreases. Ultimately, if there is not enough room for the DNA copy machine to bind to DNA without actually mis-copying useful DNA (other parts of the operating system outside the scratch space), a cell will shut down and go into a stasis mode called senescence. This is one of the major causes of aging as we know it.

Telomerase is a protein machine that adds more blank bases to the ends of DNA so that the DNA copying machinery can act for longer without shorting the DNA to the point of senescence (it increases the size of the scratch partition at the tips of your chromosomes, called 'telomeres'). Because the length of your telomeres is proportional to your age, the protein machine that lengthens your telomeres is likely helping you age less quickly.

Here it is found that exercise likely stimulates the production of that lengthening protein, Telomerase, in the heart. This study is a mechanistic study - it provides useful evidence for how various proteins interact under particular conditions. It was not designed to provide proscriptive behavioral advice for how to live longer. But given that heart failure is currently a major cause of death, understanding how to lengthen the heart's useful life would allow us to understand how to lengthen many humans' lives.

Current technologies would let us introduce DNA to cells that would direct them to produce more Telomerase, but these techniques are still mostly used in the lab and are only used clinically in the most extreme of cases because though we know exactly what kind of DNA code we would want to inject, we still have a great deal of difficulty injecting the code into a safe location that won't disrupt other critical running programs. But ultimately it is expected that we will be able to adjust the amounts of these proteins in particular tissues outside of their endogenous regulation in an effort to prevent disease, heart failure, and otherwise correct misregulations.

hyperbeing• 9 years ago

This is by far the most simplest yet lucid explanation ive read about telomeres. Thank you for writing

hannob• 9 years ago

Nothing.

Study in mice, not replicated, touching several hype topics (teleomeres), most likely totally irrelevant.

DaveSchmindel• 9 years ago

In other news, smoking is bad for your lungs!

giardini• 9 years ago

For those who cannot get beyond "mouse", here's an article and references about a human study:

"Lifestyle Changes Lengthen Telomeres" http://www.drmirkin.com/public/ezine092913.html

The study, by Dr. Dean Ornish, was published in "The Lancet Oncology" 17 September 2013 issue.

Nomentatus• 9 years ago

I've assumed for a very long time that the purpose of telomeres was to prevent cancer mutations from killing a complex organism, since the resulting growth would be limited to X generations where X is the number of telomeres on the mutated strand of DNA, and then die without those cells being able to divide again.

So while I believe the study will likely hold up; I do wonder why exercise adds telomeres. One answer is that exercise reduces cancer risk (it will get you to bed on time, mostly) so the body optimistically adds teleomeres. Alternatively, and perhaps more likely, exercise may trigger more cell division (for purposes of repair, all exercise causes some damage, to collagen if nothing else) so the extra telomeres are added as compensation in order to return to status quo cap on allowed cell divisions; maintaining the preventative but not actually extending it.

jondiggsit• 9 years ago

TLDR; exercise

Acute exercise increases expression of telomere protective genes in heart tissue

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