9/11 impacted heart health of Utahns, study finds

MURRAY — Repercussions from a terrorist attack a couple thousand miles away apparently impacted even the biological clocks of Utahns, researchers say.

In comparing DNA samples for an unrelated study on air pollution, Intermountain Medical Center Heart Institute researchers discovered that their collection of blood showed dramatic differences before and after Sept. 11, 2001.

"Living in the time we live in, we're suddenly encountering more stress burden than people living previously, simply because of this global information portal. We're actually encountering, indirectly, things we see in the Middle East, damaging weather patterns that this country has experienced over the past winter … They have an impact on our health," said John Carlquist, director of the institute's genetics lab.

He said stress — encountered even remotely — reduces a person's life span, but also increases their risk for developing age-associated diseases such as cardiovascular disease, cancers and some types of dementia, among others.

Using one of the world's largest repositories of blood samples collected from patients for the past 20 years, Carlquist and Stacey Knight, a genetic epidemiologist with the lab, found that an entire group of Utahns' DNA was changed by how they viewed or experienced the traumatic events of the terrorist attacks in New York City and Washington, D.C.

"One of the manifestations was an increased rate of admissions for heart attacks," Knight said. "There was a significant increase when we compared the year before and the year after 9/11."

Though the researchers can't confirm the increase is directly related to the traumatic event, the hospital saw about 1,000 additional patients for acute myocardial infarction in the year following the attacks.

What researchers did see was a decrease in the length of telomeres among that population of patients, Knight said.

Telomeres, or the structures on the ends of each of the 46 chromosomes within a person's cells, shorten with each cell division and replication. Ultimately, along with chronological aging, the cell no longer divides and quits replenishing the body with new cells.

The telomeres essentially reflect a person's biological age, Carlquist said.

"We know as we get older that our telomeres get shorter," he said. "As they get shorter, we become more at risk for age-related diseases."

But telomeres apparently also shorten with an increased burden of stress.

Carlquist referred to a San Francisco study in which mothers of chronically ill children were found to be biologically older than mothers of healthy children who were their same chronological age. Caregiving had aged them on average as much as 10 years more than their peers, he said.

"There are things that shorten telomeres beyond just aging," he said, adding that "any negative health influence we can think of," such as obesity, inactivity, smoking, etc., "will prematurely shorten telomere length."

But just as stress and bad habits can decrease the length of a person's telomeres, good habits and reducing stress can increase them, resulting in a longer, healthier life, the researchers said.

Carlquist called it a phenomenon of the 20th and 21st centuries.

"We are experiencing a lot of stress with just the events of the world happening every day," he said. "Our awareness should make us think about better stress reduction, exercise and mitigation techniques."

Being proactive about stress reduction, he said, is a better strategy than trying to avoid it altogether.

The researchers will present their findings at this year's American College of Cardiology Scientific Session in San Diego on March 14.

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