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Four epigenetic "clock" measures, spanning from 1.9 to 4.8 years, revealed a significant age acceleration in HIV-infected individuals that was not present in non-infected individuals. (Image: An HIV-infected immunological cell.) Photograph courtesy of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) A UCLA-led study found that alterations at the DNA level can speed up aging by about five years. Researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles claim that HIV has a "early and substantial" impact on how quickly infected individuals age, increasing biochemical changes in the body linked to normal aging within two to three years of infection. The findings suggest that a new HIV infection may reduce a person's life expectancy by about five years when compared to someone who is not affected. Lead author Elizabeth Crabb Breen, a professor emerita at UCLA's Cousins Center for Psychoneuroimmunology and of psychiatry and biobehavioral sciences ...

Our knowledge of what can be inherited from our parents and how their life experiences may impact us could be completely rewritten if a fundamental finding concerning a factor driving healthy development in embryos were made. According to recent findings, mother to child transmission of epigenetic information, which is generally reset between generations and sits on top of DNA, may occur more frequently than previously believed. We now know a lot more about which genes are affected by the unusual epigenetic process that is passed from mother to child thanks to the study, which was directed by scientists from WEHI in Melbourne, Australia. We also now know more about which proteins are crucial for regulating this peculiar process. One set of genetic instructions can produce hundreds of different cell types in our body, and epigenetics studies how our genes are turned on and off to do this. Environmental factors, such as our nutrition, can affect epigenetic alterations, but DNA is not alt...