Your body's cells can age YEARS in a single day, study suggests trends now
One bad day at work could literally age your body by years.
A new study has shown for the first time that stress can make our cells appear up to five years older in a single day.
Luckily, a good night's sleep offsets most of that damage.
But the study undermines the idea that our biological clocks, as we understand them now, are a perfect way of measuring our 'true' age.
This new study shows that over a day, people's epigenetic clocks give off different measurements. Previously, it was thought that this measurement was stable to daily changes.
Epigenetic clocks look at invisible changes to our DNA which scientists can interpret as a measure of our cells' age.
While some people measure age in years and others in smile lines - scientists are a little more complicated than that.
They say the more important metric is actually your biological age.
Biological age is determined by unwinding our DNA and reading it for tiny changes- this is called our epigenetic clock.
Think of these changes like rust on nail or scratches on a CD - just at the microscopic level.
Over a lifetime, people accumulate changes to their clocks - up until now, scientists thought your epigenetic clock was pretty much stable in the short-term, Art Petronis, a chrono-epigeneticist at the University of Toronto, Canada, and Vilnius University in Lithuania told PNAS.
But it turns out these clocks might be sensitive to changes made throughout the day too, according to Dr Petronis' new research, which was published in the peer reviewed journal called Aging Cell.
So sensitive, in fact, that the stress of a day can make a person appear to gain five years of genetic changes in a 24 hour period.
" class="c6" scrolling="no"
This is what aging looks like at the DNA level, as stressors cause little tags and changes to be added to your genetic code. Scientists can identify these markers from
