why your mum’s to blame for your wrinkles

MANY comedians, over the years, have made jokes about their wives becoming more like their mothers as they get older.

Well, Les Dawson and co were actually on to something. We were astonished to discover just how much our mothers can affect the speed at which we age.

The data is in: we’ve seen the proof at the end of our microscopes.

We are a Nobel Prize- winning molecular biologist and a health psychologist who’ve devoted years to understanding how you can slow ageing. We’ve been revealing our findings all this week in the Mail and giving you tips on getting your youthful glow back. What’s more, it’s never too late to start slowing life’s clock.

If you’ve been following our series, by now you’ll be familiar with how we know all this: through examining the end of your chromosomes — the stringlike structures where your DNA lives.

Chromosomes, remember, can be found in every single cell in your body, from the surface of your skin to the core of your liver.

At the ends of each DNA string are little-known things called telomeres. Think of them as the plastic bits at the end of your shoelaces.

The longer your telomeres, the more they protect your DNA from ‘fraying’ and succumbing to disease. And the longer your telomeres, the more youthful you will be — and feel.

After much research, we’ve isolated the precise causes of shortened telomeres, and the culprits include everything from soft drinks to depression.

Your telomeres serve as a guide to what ages you. Or at least, one important type of ageing: how much our cells can renew. Cell renewal keeps your tissues young and healthy.

But even if your telomeres are short, you can help them stabilise with our prescription for health and youthfulness.

Today, in the final part of our series, we’re going to focus on sleep — and how much of it you really need to slow ageing.

We’ll also talk about relationships and sex, and explain how the rate that you’re ageing may echo your mother’s life strains prior to your birth.

For our telomeres aren’t damaged only by our own lifestyles or bad habits. Your mother can be a powerful negative influence on your telomeres — and potential youthfulness — before you were even born. Let us explain. We discovered that your mother’s health poses something of a ‘triple threat’ to your telomeres.

First, extraordinarily, we found that the length of your telomeres is directly inherited from your mother. If your mum’s telomeres are short at the moment you are conceived — whether it’s because she’s had a hard life, eats badly or drinks too much or smokes — your telomeres may follow suit, in a biological process known as ‘direct transmission’. Put simply, ageing begins in utero. At the precise moment you are conceived, if your mother has short telomeres, you will, too.

But fathers are not off the hook! A father can also directly transmit short telomeres, but not to the same extent as a mother.) Your mother’s influence doesn’t stop there, though.

If she’s very stressed while pregnant with you, or doesn’t consume the right amount of nutrients to support the growing life inside her, your telomeres will be further eroded within the womb.

Before you have even taken your first breath, your telomeres could already have been compromised.

And telomere shortness from birth may last a lifetime.

Researchers examined a group of adult men and women and asked if their mothers had experienced any extremely stressful events while pregnant, such as the death of a loved one or divorce.

In one study, those who had been exposed to stress while they were in the womb had several common characteristics.

They were more likely to be overweight or obese. They had more insulin resistance. They didn’t cope well with stress.

And, finally, their telomeres were shorter. Even when other factors that might have influenced their

current health were taken into account, the link to their mother’s stress level held firm.

The message, then, is clear and worrying: if a pregnant woman experiences psychological stress, it appears to echo into the next generation, affecting the trajectory of telomere length for decades of the child’s life.

That’s not all. Your mother’s ability to affect your telomeres doesn’t stop at the moment of your birth. If your childhood is scarred by trauma — for example, if your mother drank too much, hit you, or was depressed — your telomeres will be further shortened by these negative experiences.

One study took telomere samples from fiveyear-old British children, then further samples when the children were ten.

The children’s mothers were then asked whether the child had been bullied, hurt by someone in their household or had witnessed domestic violence between the parents in those five intervening years. The children who had been exposed to the most violence had the greatest rate of telomere shortening.

An absent mother can also shorten a child’s telomeres. One study drew on 40 years of research done on rhesus monkeys, which are some of man’s closest natural relatives.

When the monkeys were raised in a nursery from birth — so without their mother but socialising with other monkeys — they had a range of problems from excessive aggression to poor reactions to stress.

When compared to monkeys who were raised by their mothers, the ones in a nursery had far shorter telomeres.

In humans, children who live in orphanages have shorter telomeres. But there’s hopeful

news here, too, as they can overcome this when placed in homes.

These short telomeres can have searing effects on a child. If you take a group of young children with short telomeres and examine their cardiovascular systems, you’ll find they are more likely to have greater thickening of the walls of their arteries.

These are children we are talking about here, not old people, and for them, short telomeres could mean a higher risk of early cardiovascular problems, such as heart disease.

All in all, from the studies done so far, having parents who are responsive and attentive to their children’s needs from the very moment of conception onwards seems to offer protection from excessive telomere shortening — and a speedy descent into ageing.

Biology certainly isn’t destiny, however. As we’ve been emphasising in this series, you can turn back the clock and repair damaged telomeres. However, it’s clear from our detailed analysis that our mother’s behaviour — and in some cases our father’s as well — has an even more seismic affect on our lives than perhaps we could have even imagined.