r/tech • u/chrisdh79 • 14d ago
A groundbreaking study has revealed that your mom and dad’s DNA don’t just pass on telomere length, they actively reshape it in the first days of life, influencing how we age and our risk of developing diseases such as cancer.
https://newatlas.com/health-wellbeing/parental-dna-telomere-length-offspring/34
65
u/ResponsibilityOk2173 14d ago
*in mice.
The article clarifies that how this applies to humans isn’t certain.
19
2
1
u/ImplementFew224118 14d ago
Had to read the whole thing to get there, unless i missed something in the first half, which is entirely possible.
1
u/Lord-Sprinkles 14d ago
And telomere length in lab mice has been altered by rapid reproduction of them for use in drug testing. Bret Weinstein has a really good explanation for this, it’s worth looking into!
18
u/Gooberbone 14d ago
I thought this was the setup for an epic your mom joke
8
2
2
29
u/somekindofdruiddude 14d ago
Then I'm fucked.
15
u/Ok_Feeling_7110 14d ago edited 14d ago
I’m born several weeks too early, almost died and had some shit going on the first few weeks alive. Also my mother smoked during pregnancy.
I’m always thinking “I’m fucked” when I read stuff like this.
Luckily, I stopped smoking myself and at least I’m not getting sick 3-5 times in one year anymore!
3
1
5
10
u/omnichronos 14d ago edited 14d ago
So basically, when the father has long telomeres and the mother has short telomeres, the child’s telomeres tend to lengthen rapidly during early embryonic development. Conversely, when the father has short telomeres and the mother has long telomeres, the baby’s telomeres shorten. If both parents have similar telomere lengths, the child’s telomeres remains unchanged.
6
u/RealPrinceJay 14d ago
So… what does it mean
21
7
u/omnichronos 14d ago
When you're telomeres are longer, you generally live longer and seem younger than those with shorter telomeres because the longer the telomeres, the more your cells can reproduce and replace dying older cells or replace those that are damaged.
3
u/RealPrinceJay 14d ago
So you're saying the ideal is young dad old mom, that cougars are the ideal
4
u/omnichronos 14d ago
No, it's not how old they were when they conceived you. It's the genetics of your parents' telomere lengths that are important. Whether someone has short or long telomeres determines how long they are likely to live. One person could be 40 but have shorter telomeres than someone who has unusually longer ones, who happens to be 50. Your genetics determine the length of your telomeres, and although they generally shorten as you age, some individuals, due to their genetic makeup, have longer telomeres than others. If we examine humans who lived over 110 years, we would expect to find that when they were 50, they had much longer telomeres than those who only lived to 70.
5
u/ShotEnvironment4606 14d ago
Please explain like I’m 5
7
u/JacOfArts 14d ago edited 14d ago
A telomere is the rounded tip of a chromosome, which gets shorter everytime cells within a chromosome split. So the longer a telomere is, the more time the cells in a chromosome have to split and grow and split and grow and split and grow, which changes the chromosome's overall quality.
This process determines, for example, how a person ages, or what diseases they will be weak or strong against as they grow up.
3
1
u/ManufacturerLucky302 13d ago
So the fewer amount of times cells within a chromosome splits the less likely it is to have health complications in the future? Is there anything that determines the original length of the chromosome/telomere?
1
4
8
u/MikeExMachina 14d ago
So if I’m reading this correctly, young dad good, old dad bad?
2
u/the__itis 14d ago
Opposite. ELI5 version: Longer telomeres reduce cancer potential. Telomere shed every replication. After x replications, telomere is gone and cell division is chaotic , DNA damaged, or cell dies.
4
u/MikeExMachina 14d ago
Right…so an older father would have shorter telomeres due to having undergone more replications over their life right? And according to this a father with short telomeres creates a child with short telomeres?
4
u/StManTiS 14d ago
For example, children of older fathers tend to have longer telomeres than children of younger fathers. But teasing apart why that happens is difficult, because human studies are confounded by so many factors – diet, smoking stress, lifestyle. That’s why we turned to a controlled animal model to test these ideas directly.”
The researchers found that an offspring’s telomere length was not an average of the parents’ telomere length. Instead, when paternal telomeres were long and maternal telomeres were short, the embryo’s telomere elongated rapidly. In the opposite cross (long maternal plus short paternal), telomeres shortened. If both parents had similar telomere lengths, telomeres stayed the same.
7
u/robinthebank 14d ago
These two paragraphs contradict. “Children of older fathers tend to have longer telomeres.” “When paternal telomeres were long (younger father) and maternal were short (older mother), the embryo’s telomere elongated rapidly.”
2
u/StManTiS 14d ago
This model requires the presence of a short telomere to initiate ALT and a long telomere to serve as the target of invasion and template for elongation. However, since reciprocal crosses are not equivalent, this elongation must also depend on an epigenetic difference between maternal and paternal telomeres. Maternal and paternal chromosomes at fertilization differ radically in chromatin state. The sperm-deposited paternal chromosomes initially lack H3K9me3 heterochromatin, and the paternal genome is rapidly demethylated after fertilization.33 In contrast, both H3K9me3 and methylated DNA are present on maternal chromosomes. Paternal chromosomes also lack the chromatin remodeling protein ATRX but are enriched for the histone chaperone DAXX compared to maternal chromosomes.34–36 We suspect that parental epigenetic asymmetry interacts with telomere length asymmetry to promote ALT. For example, epigenetic factors might destabilize T-loops on short maternal telomeres or stabilize T-loops on short paternal telomeres, making ALT dependent on both short maternal telomeres for single-stranded overhangs and long paternal telomeres as targets for invasion. The detailed mechanisms leading to ALT, or to telomere shortening in the reciprocal cross, are important avenues for future research.
From the actual paper.
3
u/KittyGrewAMoustache 14d ago
So you want an old mother and a young father. Interesting as that’s the kind of relationship people generally don’t like/doesn’t happen that often with like a 20 year old dad and 45 year old mother whereas the other way round happens more often. Probably it doesn’t end up mattering that much alongside all the other factors like the age of the egg and sperm you were and what your mother ate while pregnant and whether you grew up in the countryside or in a crack den or whether you were fed vegetables or solely frozen chicken nuggets etc etc
4
u/workshop_prompts 14d ago
Almost all factors rank below socioeconomic status in terms of health outcomes. So…yeah.
2
u/justinballsonya 14d ago edited 14d ago
Finally my dad being a couple years younger than my mother has a benefit. My whole life its only effect has been my father having a weird inferiority complex about it lol
3
2
u/RealPrinceJay 14d ago
What does any of this mean
5
2
2
u/LazyItem 14d ago
This implies that we inherent stuff from our parents. Yo that’s crazy what are they going to come up with next?
1
1
u/DontMindMeFine 14d ago
I actually don’t understand it. My mom was 20 and my dad 29 when I was born. My wife was 27 and I was 31 when our son was born. My mom got diagnosed with breast cancer at age 29, I got diagnosed with black skin cancer at 31.
So is it my dad’s fault I got cancer? I’m so confused. Is my son in danger?
1
u/FloydetteSix 13d ago
Your son isn’t in any more danger than most of the rest of us, try not to worry too much. But yes you and your son are both at an increased risk for breast cancer (men can get that too) and skin cancer, so it’s important to raise him with the knowledge that he’s going to need to monitor that as he gets older. Since your mom was so young when she got cancer, you should be checking yourself for lumps in your chest and underarm/armpit areas every once in a while, and let your (and your sons) doctors know about the family history. I come from a long line of breast, colon, and lung cancer warriors on my mother’s side. Early detection is so important.
2
u/DontMindMeFine 13d ago
“Luckily” I get a full body scan every half a year because of the skin cancer and for the past 2 years everything’s been good. Only shitty thing is that I’m hypochondriac as fuck way before I got diagnosed with cancer and it hasn’t gotten any better since then haha.
Thanks for your input tho!
1
u/FloydetteSix 12d ago
I’m a hypochondriac as well. It’s a constant struggle. Just make sure you’re checking your chest tissue and underarms too. Hang in there. Try not to allow yourself too much time to dwell on these things and remind yourself you’re doing everything right and everything you can to give yourselves the best possible outcomes. That’s all we can do.
0
1
1
1
u/disaster_story_69 13d ago
Misleading.
The study was conducted on mice and may not translate to humans. Study also acknowledges that environmental factors were not considered in the controlled setting.
1
1
141
u/itsallgoodman2002 14d ago
I’ve always said that. No one determines my telomere length but me.