Researchers at Brigham Women's Hospital in the United States have studied a fairly common form of anxiety called phobic anxiety and have obtained some interesting results. As it turned out, middle-aged people with any kind of phobia have much shorter telomeres than others.
Telomeres are protein complexes located at the ends of chromosomes. Their main function is to protect chromosomes and genetic information during cell division. It is believed that these are peculiar markers of biological and cellular aging. In addition, during telomere length shortening, the risk of developing heart disease, cancer, and dementia increases. Scientists also believe that a critical decrease in telomere length is the main cause of death from old age.
It was the length of telomeres that scientists measured, taking blood samples from more than five thousand women aged 42 to 69 years. As a result, it turned out that telomeres are much shorter in people with pronounced phobic anxiety.
According to the author of the work, Olivia Okereke, the results obtained answer the question of the effect of stress on the rate of aging in people. The study found a relationship between premature aging and psychological problems, in particular phobic anxiety. In other words, it is the probable accelerated aging that provokes the development of phobic anxiety in people - the body is literally afraid of premature old age, and people begin to feel it.
It is worth mentioning another interesting fact: it turns out that life expectancy is encrypted in the features of a human face.
According to the international expert on social medicine, Professor Yevgeny Chernosvitov, he noticed long ago that the death mask of any person is almost completely symmetrical, while the halves of the face are different during life. You can conduct a simple experiment: take your photograph and attach a mirror perpendicular to it, which has two reflective sides. If you first look at the face, which will be composed of two right halves (one reflected in the mirror, and the other in the picture), then it will look like your face, but only to some extent. The same goes for the left halves. And the most surprising thing is that these two types of faces - "left" and "right" - will almost certainly have noticeable differences.
The professor then suggests comparing in a similar way photographs taken at different times, for example, 15, 10 and 5 years ago. And compare them with a modern snapshot. According to Chernosvitov, in this case it will be possible to notice one important detail: the difference between "left" and "right" decreases markedly over time, and exponentially. The scientist claims that he even derived a formula that allows him to calculate the life expectancy quite accurately, but he does not want to reveal it - this is his know-how.