When depression takes its toll on your mental wellness, the last thing you want to hear is that it’s also making you age faster. However, don’t shoot the messenger, but new research, published in Biological Psychiatry, is again blaming stress as the primary culprit for damaging your wellbeing, including aspects of the ageing process.
It’s already established that stress has an impact on many of your functions, and wellness experts are now saying that stress is a major factor in hormonal balance, particularly for symptoms such as hot flushes. However, though this is a symptom of getting older that the world can recognise, there is a secret ageing of depression that you don’t see. Depression shortens the length of telomeres – the protective caps on the ends of chromosomes that indicate ageing, as they naturally shorten over time.
According to the study’s findings, telomeres are highly susceptible to stress and depression. The scientists came to this conclusion from studying the human stress response that is regulated by your hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis, or HPA axis. The HPA axis controls your body’s levels of cortisol, the primary stress hormone, and is known to function less well in those whose wellbeing is affected by depression and stress-related illnesses.
Hence, the researchers studied the relationships between telomere length, stress, and depression by measuring telomere length in two groups: those with major depressive disorder and a control group of non-depressed individuals. They discovered that, in the depressed participants, telomere length was shorter, which was associated with a low cortisol state in both the depressed and non-depressed groups. From this the researchers concluded that the depressed patients were ageing faster than the control group.
In conclusion, then, as it is known that stress has a huge part to play in your depression, the more you can control your stress the better off you will be. One way of achieving this may be with bioidentical natural progesterone. Calming feelings of anxiety and lifting your mood are key factors in managing your depression, and bioidentical natural progesterone has an important role in helping you achieve this. As an added bonus, it also helps you to keep your hormones balanced which, again, is crucial in depression management.
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Is Your Depression Causing You to Age More Quickly?
