Psychological stress can activate gut macrophages, leading to inflammation, increased endotoxin, and activated immune cells, which may affect leukocyte telomere length.

“The reason I ask that is because, well, there's a lot of interesting stuff about brain, and aging, and microbiome. But also psychological stress. I don't know if you're aware of this sort of field of studying the inflammatory process that happen in the gut and like corticotropin-cortical tropic releasing hormone activates like macrophages in the gut, and that actually causes them to have an inflammatory response, and this jacks up endotoxin in the blood, which is an inflammation, right? And you're going to have activated immune cells and things like that, which would then theoretically, I would imagine affect telomere length. Particularly leukocytes, right, in blood cells.”