Overuse of gadgets can make you age faster

A study indicated that spending too much time on gadgets may impact your eyesight or mental health, due to excessive blue light from gadgets, it has been proven that when people overuse devices like smartphones or laptops, they age faster.

An animal model study published in the journal “Frontiers in Aging” has unequivocally shown that humans age faster or are affected by blue light emitted from gadgets like smartphones and laptops. It has been found that the excessive use of these devices affects our eyesight and overall health rapidly.

Excessive exposure to blue light from everyday devices, like TVs, laptops and smartphones, harmful events occur in various cells in our body. It has been found to affect everything from skin and fat cells to sensory neurons. Strangely enough, researchers have made this discovery using flies.

It was found that chemicals that are essential for cells to function correctly -- are altered in fruit flies exposed to blue light.

The Researcher finds that the Flies exposed to blue light have been found to rapidly ‘turn on’ stress-protection genes, in contrast to flies kept in constant darkness for long periods of time.

To understand why this causes the flies to age faster, the scientists compared the levels of metabolites in flies exposed to blue light for two weeks to those in complete darkness.

Blue light exposure caused significant differences in the levels of metabolites measured by the researchers in the cells of fly heads. In particular, they found that the levels of the metabolite succinate were increased, but glutamate levels were lowered.

The changes recorded by the researchers suggest that the cells are operating at a suboptimal level, and this may cause their premature death, and further, explain their previous findings that blue light accelerates aging.

S Mohini Ratna, Editor, VARINDIA