Scientists found that sleep and exercise can suppress a blood mutation carried by up to half of people over 80, but only if you have the right gene mutated
Between 20 and 30 percent of people in their fifties and sixties carry a population of mutant blood stem cells without knowing it, a condition called clonal hematopoiesis that's increasingly discovered by accident on routine genetic blood panels. By age 80, more than half of people have it. There's currently no approved treatment. A study published in Nature this month found that sleep and exercise can dramatically suppress the condition and the heart disease it drives, but the effect depends entirely on which gene is mutated. For people with JAK2 or TET2 mutations, uninterrupted sleep and exercise reprogrammed the mutant cells directly, sparing healthy cells nearby, and significantly reduced atherosclerosis. For people with DNMT3A, the single most common mutation involved, neither intervention did anything at all.