Sitting Too Much May Be Linked To Shorter Telomeres, Study Suggests.

reports that investigators “assessed nearly 1,500 older women.” The investigators “found that women who sat for more than 10 hours a day and got less than 40 minutes of moderate-to-vigorous physical activity daily had shorter telomeres,” which “are caps on the end of DNA strands that protect chromosomes from deterioration.” They took blood samples from nearly 1,500 older women enrolled in the Women’s Health Initiative, a long-term study of chronic diseases in post-menopausal women, and focused on the telomeres: the tips of the tightly packed DNA in every cell. Previous studies have found that as cells divide and age, they lose bits of the telomeres, so the length of this region can be a marker for how old a cell (and indirectly the person the cells belong to) is. The researchers compared telomere length to how much the women exercised, to see if physical activity affected aging. http://time.com/4637898/sitting-aging-sedentary/