London, August 22: Researchers at Duke University Medical Centre have discovered a mechanism that could explain why stress causes DNA damage.

"We believe this paper is the first to propose a specific mechanism through which a hallmark of chronic stress, elevated adrenaline, could eventually cause DNA damage that is detectable," said senior author Robert J. Lefkowitz, M. D., James B. Duke Professor of Medicine and Biochemistry and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) investigator at Duke University Medical Centre.

"This could give us a plausible explanation of how chronic stress may lead to a variety of human conditions and disorders, which range from merely cosmetic, like greying hair, to life-threatening disorders like malignancies," Lefkowitz said.

P53 is a tumour suppressor protein and is considered a "guardian of the genome" - one that prevents genomic abnormalities.

"The study showed that chronic stress leads to prolonged lowering of p53 levels," said Makoto Hara, Ph. D., a postdoctoral fellow in the Lefkowitz laboratory. "We hypothesize that this is the reason for the chromosomal irregularities we found in chronically stressed mice." (ANI)