http://medicalxpress.com/ en-us Medical Xpress internet news portal provides the latest news on Health and Medicine. A team of researchers at Kaiser Permanente and the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) has identified a significant relationship between mortality and the length of telomeres, the stretches of DNA that protect the ends of chromosomes, according to a presentation on Nov. 8 at the American Society of Human Genetics 2012 meeting in San Francisco. http://medicalxpress.com/news/2012-11-significant-relationship-mortality-telomere-length.html Genetics Thu, 08 Nov 2012 13:30:05 EST news271583215 Every cell in the body has chromosomes with so-called telomeres, which are shortened over time and also through lifestyle choices such as smoking and obesity. Researchers have long speculated that the shortening of telomeres increases the risk of heart attack and early death. Now a large-scale population study in Denmark involving nearly 20,000 people shows that there is in fact a direct link, and has also given physicians a future way to test the actual cellular health of a person. http://medicalxpress.com/news/2012-02-cellular-aging-heart-early-death.html Cardiology Thu, 16 Feb 2012 05:30:01 EST news248590517 Scientists at Johns Hopkins have provided more clues to one of the least understood phenomena in some cancers: why the "ends caps" of cellular DNA, called telomeres, lengthen instead of shorten. http://medicalxpress.com/news/2011-06-genes-linked-telomeres-cancer-cells.html Cancer Thu, 30 Jun 2011 14:00:11 EST news228661010