Scientists Say Targeting Chromosomes Is Key To Stopping The Aging Process

Aging is a condition that every single human being on earth has to deal with, and with those who have rare diseases like progeria, it’s an even more serious issue. That’s why scientists have been hard at work to reverse the process and a team from Houston Methodist Research Institute (HMRI) appears to have made a breakthrough in this regard.

Led by John Cooke, who is the chair of HMRI’s department of cardiovascular sciences, the researchers paid close attention to telomeres for their study, Futurism reports. Telomeres are basically the tips of chromosomes and they have long been associated with aging, which affects their length.

In order to get the data they needed, the scientists looked into the cases of children suffering from progeria, a disease that causes an unnaturally rapid aging progress and is ultimately fatal. There is currently no cure for the disease. However, Cooke notes in the press release about the study that if the telomeres in these children can be reversed, the aging process can be stopped.

“We all have telomere erosion over time, and many of the things that happen to these children at an accelerated pace occur in all of us,” Cooke said. “What we’ve shown is that when we reverse the process of the telomere shortening in the cells from these children and lengthen them, it can reverse a lot of the problems associated with aging.”

Cooke’s team is not the first to look into the prospect of manipulating telomeres in order to put a halt on the aging process. Unfortunately, current science is not precise enough to actually do anything about it. There’s the matter of the telomere length functioning as an anti-tumor fail safe, for one thing. Then there’s the part about the samples only having been tested in laboratory environments and never in living specimens.