Analyzing data from the Health and Retirement Study, researchers from U-M, UBC-Vancouver, UC-Berkeley, and UCSF found that early trauma – in particular psychological and social adversities experienced over time in childhood – are linked to shorter telomeres in later life. David Weir says the study’s data source, the HRS, includes “the kind of large, diverse and nationally representative group of participants needed to detect these intriguing effects of lifetime experience on our fundamental biology.”

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