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).

Genetic "switch" of depression found

The social cost of depression is impressive: over 100 billion dollars for the 16% of population that every year is victim of this disease.

Now in the Yale University, New Haven (Connecticut), the research group leaded by prof. Duman, isolated this gene, MKP-1, which has the role to promote the depression symptoms in some lab mice when activated. The gene has been first noticed in a greater percentage in dead people to which depression has been diagnosed during their lives with respect to the gene-presence percentage of some healthy people used as controls. Then it has been isolated in mice and activated/deactivated in order to make experiments, and they found that the mice enacted depressive behaviors when the gene was activated. The paper has been published by Nature Medicine.

After reading the paper, I still have a question: how and by means of which mechanisms this "switch" is activated? Is there an event or a series of events which "activate" the gene?? I don't think that all the genetically predisposed people necessarily have to be depressed.

In sum, I guess that also the gene has to be somehow "activated" by something, in order to trigger depressive behaviors by means of the production of these "wrong" proteines, in turn influencing the serotonine reuptaking!!
Of course, the practical outcome of this direction of studies will be (hopefully) the production of a new series of medical drugs which will be able to target directly the gene, limitating the well known problem of those "treatment-resistant patients".

Personally, I'm still in the opinion that there are some top-down ways of de-activate the wrong functioning of the serotonine reuptake triggered by the gene, and that the only usage of pharmacological treatments is pretty useless, since when you stop assuming the medicine, your activated gene is producing the wrong stuff again (unless they don't find a way to definitively deactivate the gene in people's genetic code)...I guess that, if there are some external (or internal) events which "activate" the beginning of the wrong chain process, there is also a way to de-activate it...maybe finding the thing that started everything, or trying to find an alternative way to regulate the process bypassing the main problem, without the necessity to assume drugs.

Click on the link to see the original article: Scoperto “interruttore” genetico della depressione (articolo in italiano).