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Stress might make you age faster, but it’s reversible

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Study suggests biological age isn’t just associated with time, but also how one’s experience of pressure or other external factors impacts the body.

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Free Malaysia Today
A new study suggests that stress has the ability to make you age faster. (Envato Elements pic)

PARIS:
Stress has long been known to have negative effects on health, but scientists have now studied how it might affect the ageing of the body. And their findings suggest that stress can indeed accelerate biological ageing, but that the effect isn’t necessarily permanent.

Researchers at Duke University Medical School and Harvard University Medical School looked at changes in biological age in humans and mice in response to various factors, according to the epigenetic clock – a tool that can accurately determine an individual’s biological age.

Published in the journal “Cell Metabolism”, their work reveals that stress can have a significant impact on biological age; but that once the peak of that stress has passed, the trend can be reversed.

“Biological age may increase over relatively short time periods in response to stress, but this is transient and trends back towards baseline following recovery,” reads the study news release.

According to the researchers, these modifications – which occur over a few days and up to possibly a few months – show that biological age is not just associated with the passage of time (chronological age), but also how each individual’s experience of stress or other external factors can play a role in the ageing of the body.

“This finding of fluid, fluctuating, malleable age challenges the longstanding conception of a unidirectional upward trajectory of biological age over the life course,” says co-senior study author James White of Duke University.

“Previous reports have hinted at the possibility of short-term fluctuations in biological age, but the question of whether such changes are reversible has, until now, remained unexplored,” he adds. “Critically, the triggers of such changes were also unknown.”

Free Malaysia Today
Scientists observed an increase in the biological age of pregnant women, which then returns to a ‘normal’ level following childbirth. (Envato Elements pic)

The researchers hypothesise and substantiate that other factors could also have an impact on the acceleration of the body’s ageing process. Major surgery, pregnancy, or severe forms of Covid-19, for instance, could result in “transient changes in biological age”.

“The findings imply that severe stress increases mortality, at least in part, by increasing biological age,” says co-senior study author Vadim Gladyshev of Harvard Medical School.

“This notion thus suggests that mortality may be decreased by reducing biological age, and that the ability to recover from stress may be an important determinant of successful ageing and longevity.”

Learning to manage stress could, therefore, have an effect on the ageing of the body. But the opposite is also true, in that biological age could be used to gauge stress levels and an individual’s ability to recover.

This study may have succeeded in highlighting short-term fluctuations in biological age in response to a variety of factors, but the researchers believe more work is now needed to learn about the impact this could have over a lifetime.

A previous study, published in June in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, had already shown that stress could indirectly participate in accelerating the ageing of the immune system.

These are important findings at a time when mental health is considered to be one of the major public health issues of our time, along with sedentary lifestyles, with potentially detrimental effects on the body and on premature ageing.

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