A study out of New Zealand has concluded that adolescents who smoked, were obese or who had a psychological disorder when 11-15 biologically aged nearly three months faster than their peers every year.
Researchers used data from 910 people who were part of the Dunedin Study, a long-term investigation that followed participants born April 1972 through March 1973 in Dunedin, New Zealand. The group tracked their health and behavior from age 3 until they were 45.
The recent analysis assessed asthma, cigarette smoking, obesity and psychological disorders at ages 11, 13 and 15. It concluded that by age 45, participants who experienced two or more of three health concerns — smoking, obesity, or psychological disorders, such as anxiety, depression or ADHD — as adolescents walked 11.2 centimeters per second slower, had an older brain age by 2½ years, and had an older facial age by nearly four years than those who didn’t.
“Participants with asthma were not biologically older at midlife … compared with those without asthma,” the researchers wrote.
“This adds to that past research by expanding it to these four conditions, of which we only found that three were associated with accelerated aging,” the study’s first author, Kyle Bourassa, a clinical psychology researcher and advanced research fellow at the Durham VA Health Care System, told CNN. This study “shows that these have independent effects, so each of them is exerting their own association with later aging.”
Cigarette smoking and obesity seem obvious reasons for accelerated aging, but why psychological disorders?
People with anxiety, depression or other mental health problems might be more likely to exercise less or have a poor diet, Jasmin Wertz, a postdoctoral associate with the Moffitt & Caspi team at Duke University in North Carolina, told CNN last year.
And Dr. Brent Forester, chief of the Division of Geriatric Psychiatry at McLean Hospital in Massachusetts, said in a previous interview with CNN: “We think about depression as a disease that originates in the brain with chemical disturbances and things like that. But depression probably is a systemic illness that affects the entire body. The longer I’ve done this work, and the longer that I’ve worked with older adults in particular, the more I think of psychiatric illness as not a brain disorder, but as a whole-body disorder.”
To determine biological age, the researchers analyzed the participants’ pace of aging, gait speed, brain age and facial age. Data analysis was performed from February 11 to September 27, 2021.
“No participants in this cohort were prescribed stimulants for attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, and selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors were not yet in use for adolescent depression and anxiety during the study period,” the researchers wrote. “Whereas 81.1% of the adolescents with asthma received some type of treatment, which could have mitigated the implications for biological aging.”
Bourassa added: “The hope is if we were to study a cohort now, a much higher proportion of those children and adolescents are actually going to be treated for these things, which will reduce the risk of accelerated aging later in life. Our paper reaffirms that those are important treatments and those kinds of investments younger in the lifespan could net big benefits in terms of both health and the cost of health care later on as well.”
The full analysis can be read in JAMA Pediatrics.
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