Drinking makes you older at the cellular level
"Telomeres, the protein caps on the ends of human chromosomes , are markers of aging and overall health," said Naruhisa Yamaki, M.D., a clinical fellow at the Kobe University Graduate School of Medicine. Yamaki explained that every time a cell replicates, a tiny bit of telomere is lost, so they get shorter with age. But some groups may have shorter telomeres for reasons other than aging. "Our study showed that alcoholic patients have a shortened telomere length, which means that heavy drinking causes biological aging at a cellular level," he said. "It is alcohol rather than acetaldehyde that is associated with a shortened telomere length." Yamaki will present this research at the RSA meeting on June 25. Yamaki and his co-authors recruited 255 study participants from alcoholism treatment services at Kurihama National Hospital in Yokosuka, Japan: 134 alcoholic patients and 121 age-matched controls or non-alcoholics, ranging in age from 41 to 85 year...