Elizabeth Blackburn Quotes

I don't often meet people who want to suffer cardiovascular disease or whatever, and we get those things as a result of the lifelong accumulation of various types of molecular and cellular damage.

human genetics has taught us that when it comes to our telomerase, we humans live on a knife edge. OK, simply put, yes, nudging up telomerase does decrease the risks of some diseases, but it also increases the risks of certain and rather nasty cancers.

Medicine has been successful by treating diseases in a very specific way once the damage is done. But telomere length integrates a lot of factors together and gives you an overall picture of risk for what is now emerging as a lot of diseases that tend to occur together, such as diabetes and heart disease.

that's an incredibly hopeful message for us humans to be receiving from pond scum, because it turns out that as we humans age, our telomeres do shorten, and remarkably, that shortening is aging us. Generally speaking, the longer your telomeres, the better off you are. It's the overshortening of telomeres that leads us to feel and see signs of aging. My skin cells start to die and I start to see fine lines, wrinkles. Hair pigment cells die. You start to see gray. Immune system cells die. You increase your risks of getting sick. In fact, the cumulative research from the last 20 years has made clear that telomere attrition is contributing to our risks of getting cardiovascular diseases, Alzheimer's, some cancers and diabetes, the very conditions many of us die of.

Being overweight and obesity are major risk factors for many chronic diseases for South Dakotans of all ages. When people are overweight or obese, they have more health problems and more serious health problems, in addition to higher health care costs.

Diabetes and obesity together are the worst disease facing the country and its getting worse

Unlike other diseases, the vulnerability to cancer lies in ourselves. We always thought of disease as exogenous, but research into cancer has turned that idea on its head - as long as we live, grow, age, there will be cancer.

My grandmother passed away from diabetes. And my father died from heart disease as a result of diabetes. They were in their early 60s.

Poor diet and sedentary behaviour have led to an increase in obesity and lifestyle-related disease and a huge rise in chronic medical conditions.

People dramatically underestimate how much sleep is linked to all the diseases killing us. We know a lack of sleep is linked to numerous forms of cancer - bowel, prostate, breast cancer.

We've gone from a preponderance of acute and infectious disease as a source of premature death to chronic diseases, which are the preponderance of the burden of illness in most of the world. That puts a much higher premium on the prevention of chronic disease than ever in history.

Age is the single largest risk factor for an enormous number of diseases. So if you can essentially postpone aging, then you can have beneficial effects on a whole wide range of disease.

Your age is your No. 1 risk factor for almost every disease, but it's not a disease itself.

This enzyme, called telomerase, slows the rate at which telomeres degrade, and research indicates that healthy people with longer telomeres have less risk of developing the common illnesses of aging - like heart disease, diabetes, and cancer, which are three big killers today.

One characteristic aspect of ageing is the increased susceptibility to disease, particularly age-related diseases such as cardiovascular diseases and cancer.

Checking your telomere length is a bit like weighing yourself: you get this single number which depends on a lot of factors. Telomere length gives a sense of your underlying health.

I really do believe that America has this weight problem - obesity issues - and we have all these diseases that we get - heart disease, cancer, diabetes, autoimmune diseases - that are primarily lifestyle diseases.

The goal is to learn more about telomere length and other markers of ageing, how best to measure these markers, how they are related to health and lifestyle, and how people respond to learning their own telomere length results.

Quite frankly, I'm tired of taking insulin and pumping my stomach every three days and pricking my finger and drawing blood out of it every day - it's a tedious, meticulous, annoying disease that never goes away. And I want to get rid of it like everybody else does.

We need to think of chronic disease, hypertension, cancer, like H1N1. In fact, there's an epidemic of chronic disease.

If a test showed you had telomere shortening, it would be a red flag suggesting you should take a look at possible risk factors.

Micronutrient-poor foods, like pasta, sugar, and soda, don't just give you empty calories and make you fat; they also do damage to the body and cause disease.

Diabetes is a lousy, lousy disease.

Even slight elevations in blood sugar have been shown to increase the risk of Alzheimer's disease.

We had discovered something unheard of: the more chronic stress you are under, the shorter your telomeres, meaning the more likely you were to fall victim to an early disease span and perhaps untimely death. Our findings meant that people's life events and the way we respond to these events can change how you maintain your telomeres.