Depression and Grey Hair

      You are going to be old one day. Yes, it's true. In time, your skin will wrinkle, your vision will worsen, your bones will grow frail, and your hair color will change to white or grey. You feeling sad yet? Well, you may want to think twice before you dwell on that sadness. In other words, don't let yourself fall into depression. Unfortunately, sometimes we have about as much a choice of whether we become depressed as we do of whether we get old. However, that doesn't mean we can't try our best to avoid one unfortunate happening in order to avoid the other.
      Let me explain. According to an article by the Huffington Post, a recent study performed in the Netherlands tested 1,900 individuals who experienced major depressive disorders at some point in their lives (and 500 individuals who had not), to find that people who had depression had shorter telomeres. Experts at the University of Utah reveal that telomeres, located at the ends of chromosomes, are stretches of DNA that are analogous to the plastic tips on the ends of our shoelaces; they keep our DNA from "fraying". When we are born, our telomeres are long, with about 8,000 base pairs made of the nucleic acid bases guanine, adenine, thymine, and cytosine. Over time, though, as our cells undergo cell division multiple times, our telomeres shorten. Long story short, if telomeres become too short, a cell will die, and cells getting closer to death over time essentially leads to organisms aging. Going back to the Netherlands study, researchers found that individuals who had experienced depression had shorter telomeres than their counterparts in the control group. Moreover, a higher severity of depression, along with a longer duration of symptoms tended to correlate with shorter telomeres, even when researchers controlled for weight, age, smoking, drinking, and other lifestyle-related factors. It was also suggested that telomere shortening could result from an impairment in the body's stress system. This, to me, would be reasonable, given that individuals with major depressive disorder may have experienced some huge stressful event or psychological stressor and not been able to handle it well enough, which could ultimately lead to depression; thus, an impaired stress system may be to blame for both the short telomeres and the depression (uh oh).
      Overall, the shorter your telomeres are, technically, the older your cells are and the closer they are to dying. When our cells die, we die. The question has been raised, then, whether this aging caused by telomeres progressively shortening can be stopped or reversed. Research is currently being performed on the enzyme, telomerase, that adds nucleotides to the ends of telomeres in order to reverse their shortening. There has not yet been a clear solution to this problem of stress and/or depression potentially increasing the rate of telomere shortening besides living a healthy lifestyle. Eating right, abstaining from abuse of alcohol and drugs, not smoking, and exercising may be even more important for depressed individuals than others. Gotta protect those telomeres!

References:

 Gholipour, B. (2013, Nov 12). Depression linked with shorter telomeres, a sign of cell aging. Huffington post. Retrieved from http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/11/12/depression-aging-cell-telomeres-shorter_n_4260476.html

Siegel, L. (2013). Are telomeres the key to aging and cancer?. Retrieved from http://learn.genetics.utah.edu/content/begin/traits/telomeres/