Tuesday, April 18, 2023, 00:32
1377 readings
Stress and anxiety accelerate aging PHOTO / Parents
A recent study in UK, on more than 100,000 people, by scientists at King’s College London, made a worrying discovery for health. Experts have found that two sometimes overlooked conditions, depression and anxiety, can lead to accelerated aging of the human body.
It has long been known that people with anxiety, bipolar disorder and depression also suffer from poorer physical health, and now scientists have found evidence to suggest this is because mental health is linked to accelerated aging, according to The Telegraph.
Dr Julian Mutz, a postdoctoral researcher at King’s College London, led a project that analyzed data on 168 different blood metabolites (products of metabolism) from 110,780 participants in the UK Biobank study.
Unusual discovery after 1,500 years: A never-before-seen chapter of the Bible
The profile of markers in the blood showed that people with mental health problems look like a person older than the patient’s actual age, the data shows.
“We examined biological aging in people with bipolar disorder, depression, or anxiety disorder,” Dr. Mutz said. “We found that in these diagnoses, people with a history of mental illness had a biological age that was older than their actual age.
“The differences were the biggest for people with bipolar disorder, the smallest for people with anxiety disorder, and depression was somewhere in between.
“We observed the largest difference between biological age and actual age in people with bipolar disorder, an average difference of about two years. “For depression, the corresponding difference was about one year, and for anxiety disorder it was 0.7 years.
The treasure hidden at the bottom of the oceans: It is worth 700 trillion dollars VIDEO
“The finding that these differences were greatest in people with bipolar disorder is something we’ve also seen for other measures of biological aging, for example when looking at frailty.”
The study was presented at the European Congress of Psychiatry in Paris, and Dr. Mutz said that while the data did not prove causality, they opened avenues for future research.
“There are several plausible pathways linking psychiatric disorders to accelerated biological aging,” he said.
“For example, lifestyle (physical inactivity, higher smoking rates), biology (overactivation of the autonomic nervous system, chronic low-grade inflammation) and psychosocial factors (social isolation, loneliness) in people with mental illness negatively affect biological aging and on health, evidenced by the higher prevalence of age-related diseases and lower life expectancy compared to the general population.
