Meditation, psychological well-being promotes cellular longevity by means of telomerase enzyme

The article (read a review here) is about a study promoted by University of California, Davis (UCD), and University of California, San Francisco (UCSF).
It maybe opens the way to a series of scientific investigations aimed to the understanding of the biological processes which occur in human body during and following meditation. The scientific paper has been accepted by the Journal Psychoneuroendocrinology (click on the link to read the abstract).

So it could be true that meditating makes our well-being improve. But this happens not for something "magical" or misterious, it could be due to a series of modifications of psychological processes that, by means of the reaching of "mindfulness" states, in turn stimulate the production of an enzyme, naturally present in our body-cells, which ensures them a longer life.

This enzyme, in fact, allows the chromosome to recode more than normal the genic information contained in the DNA by "registering" the information and re-proposing it even after duplicating of the cell. We know that everytime the cell duplicates, it lose some of the genic information contained at its end (telomeres) and when there is no more information, the cell dies because it cannot reproduce anymore. With the telomerase, instead, the enzyme that we are talking about, the telomeres present on the RNA of the chromosomes are enlongated and transcription is always possible, so basically the cell is long-lived.

For the description of the telomerase process, Elizabeth H. Blackburn, Carol W. Greider and Jack W. Szostak won the medicine Nobel prize in 2009.

Click here to read the orignal article: Meditazione, benessere psicologico e longevità cellulare: merito di un enzima (articolo in Italiano).