Power of Exercise - April 2010

Did you know...

Exercise could be a fountain of youth?

Recently, researchers in Germany evaluated the impact of exercise on the life span of cells.  They selected four groups of people for their study: young sedentary people, middle-aged sedentary people, young professional runners and middle-aged longtime, long-distance runners.  The first thing the researchers noticed was that the older runners looked remarkably younger than their sedentary counterparts of the same age.  But what they found in the cells of older runners was even more surprising.

The scientists studied the white blood cells of adults from each group, looking specifically at telomeres within the cells.  Telomeres are tiny caps at the ends of DNA strands, which get slightly snipped in size each time DNA strands replicate.  Eventually, if the telomeres become too short, the cell dies.  Telomere length is generally accepted as a reliable marker of cell age.  Essentially, the shorter the telomere, the older and more tired the cell.

The two groups of young people had telomeres of about the same length, whether they ran excessively or sat around all day. Age had not yet snipped away significant telomere length.   However, when the researchers measured telomeres in the middle-aged subjects, the situation was quite different. Older sedentary people had "aged" telomeres- they were shortened just as to be expected with age.  But the middle-aged runners actually had very youthful telomeres that looked remarkably similar to those of the young people. Exercise, at the molecular level had an anti-aging effect.

A similar study conducted by Thomas LaRocca, a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Integrative Physiology at the University of Colorado in Boulder, found that in people aged 55 to 72 years, the fitter a person was, the younger their cells.

What does CPC recommend?

There are plenty of reasons to exercise- for heart health, weight control, improved mood, reductions in arthritis and osteoporosis, better quality sleep, to name a few.  In the study cited above, the older runners ran an average of 50 miles per week.  It is not clear from these studies how much exercise is required to enhance cell lifespan.  National standards recommend exercising at least 30 minutes per day, most days of the week.  Dr. Christian Werner, author of the German study says, "any form of intense exercise that is regularly performed over a long period of time'' will likely improve ''telomere biology".  So go ahead, outrun your ID card all the way to the fountain of youth.

The studies cited above were published in Circulation. 2009;120:S492 and Mechanisms of Ageing and Development. 2010 Feb;131(2):165-7