Optimism and epigenomic activation

Posted on 8. March 2009 by Vincent Giuliano

There were a number of press reports this morning on a finding based on the Woman’s Health Initiative data, a study of over 100,000 woman that started in 1994.  The study shows that a piece of conventional wisdom often found in touchie-feely books is in fact correct: positive mental attitude enhances longevity; negative attitude reduces it.  Pessimistic woman, those with a dim outlook on life, were 30 percent more likely to die from heart disease and 14 percent more likely to die from any cause than optimistic ones.  Cynically hostile women, ones who tend to mistrust people, were 23 percent more likely to die from cancer and 16 percent more likely to die from any cause.   Optimistic women were also less likely to smoke cigarettes or have high blood pressure or, diabetes.  Yet again, the message is that your mental state can create epigenomic modifications, DNA methylation on your chromosomes and histone acetylation/deacetylation modifications, and therefore alter your gene expression pattern and therefore affect your longevity.  There is no more mystery to it.

About Vincent Giuliano

Being a follower, connoisseur, and interpreter of longevity research is my latest career. I have been at this part-time for well over a decade, and in 2007 this became my mainline activity. In earlier reincarnations of my career. I was founding dean of a graduate school and a university professor at the State University of New York, a senior consultant working in a variety of fields at Arthur D. Little, Inc., Chief Scientist and C00 of Mirror Systems, a software company, and an international Internet consultant. I got off the ground with one of the earliest PhD's from Harvard in a field later to become known as computer science. In various ways I contributed to the Computer Revolution starting in the 1950s and the Internet Revolution starting in the late 1980s. I am now engaged in doing the same for The Longevity Revolution. I have published something like 200 books and papers as well as over 400 .entries in this blog, and have enjoyed various periods of notoriety. If you do a Google search on Vincent E. Giuliano, most if not all of the entries on the first few pages that come up will be ones relating to me. I have a general writings site at www.vincegiuliano.com and an extensive site of my art at www.giulianoart.com.
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