Quote:
Originally Posted by cathybee1
Hi, Greg...lots of wood! Bruce has about 2 cords stacked so far. [snip] But since he was there, I talked telomeres a little bit with him, casually mentioned TERC and TERT -- he said "everybody's telomeres get shorter as they age." But then said they would do some extra genetic testing...so we'll see what they come up with.
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Catherine,
Sorry for the slow response. I was in Nashville working 12-hour-plus days rehabbing the bathroom in my daughter's new old house. Came back, four weeks after my last RBC transfusion, to find my HGB at 6.3. So I'm now having three units.
Glad you have lots of wood stacked. I just read there's a good chance we'll have a mild winter, which would be just fine with me.
The telomere story is pretty fascinating stuff. Turns out there are three ways of measuring them, one of which has my favorite name so far for a lab procedure: "Southern blot." This sounds like it should be a version of the Rorschach test for folks who live south of the Mason-Dixon line -- or maybe what you feel like after consuming half a fifth of Jack Daniels.
I didn't get the Southern Blot, however. Nor did I get the Flow-FISH, which records telomere length in each of a half-dozen different types of white blood cells (leukocytes).
Instead I got the quantitative polymerase chain reaction (qPCR), which just gives one number based on all types of WBCs. I asked for a copy of the report and got a single page with this scatter chart in the middle of it.
[IMG]
Telomeres3 by
hankins.greg, on Flickr[/IMG]
The little red dot is me. If you look at the graph a while, and notice the trend line, you can see that I have a telomere length that would be short for the average centenarian (though the sample out there in the big numbers is pretty small. There's also a big spread in the sample of healthy subjects. But I'm 2.3 standard deviations below the age-matched mean.
I'm not really sure how much the test costs, but there's a lab up in BC that offers it commercially, so Bruce's doctor should be able to order the test if you want to check it out.
Take Care!
Greg