It isn't just Flint: Scientists find alarming deterioration in DNA of the urban poor [View all]

[Octafish]

Important news missing from my television screen, my local paper, and the rest of Corporate McPravda:

Residents of the nation's cities are contaminated by all manner of toxins affecting health and well-being, as measured by genetic deterioration. And the poorer the resident, generally the greater the deterioration.



Scientists Find Alarming Deterioration In DNA Of The Urban Poor

by Nico Pitney
Huffington Post, 05/08/2015

The urban poor in the United States are experiencing accelerated aging at the cellular level, and chronic stress linked both to income level and racial-ethnic identity is driving this physiological deterioration.

These are among the findings published this week by a group of prominent biologists and social researchers, including a Nobel laureate. Dr. Arline Geronimus, a visiting scholar at the Stanford Center for Advanced Study and the lead author of the study, described it as the most rigorous research of its kind examining how "structurally rooted social processes work through biological mechanisms to impact health."

What They Found

Researchers analyzed telomeres of poor and lower middle-class black, white, and Mexican residents of Detroit. Telomeres are tiny caps at the ends of DNA strands, akin to the plastic caps at the end of shoelaces, that protect cells from aging prematurely. Telomeres naturally shorten as people age. But various types of intense chronic stress are believed to cause telomeres to shorten, and short telomeres are associated with an array of serious ailments including cancer, diabetes, and heart disease.

Evidence increasingly points to telomere length being highly predictive of healthy life expectancy. Put simply, "the shorter your telomeres, the greater your chance of dying."

The new study found that low-income residents of Detroit, regardless of race, have significantly shorter telomeres than the national average. "There are effects of living in high-poverty, racially segregated neighborhoods -- the life experiences people have, the physical exposures, a whole range of things -- that are just not good for your health," Geronimus said in an interview with The Huffington Post.

CONTINUED...

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/05/08/poverty-race-ethnicity-dna-telomeres_n_7228530.html

Seems we're going to need a bigger jail or Snyder's cell is going to be overcrowded.