Stress might make you age faster, but it's not irreversible

STRESS is known to have negative effects on health, but American scientists have now studied how it might affect the aging of the body. Their findings suggest that stress can indeed accelerate biological aging, but that the effect isn't necessarily permanent.

So, not only is biological age determined by more than just the passage of time, but taking positive action could help prevent the body aging too quickly.

You may have heard people say that age is a state of mind. Now, it seems that age isn't just in our heads, but in the way we live our lives or manage certain daily events.

This is what a study conducted by researchers at Duke University Medical School and Harvard University Medical School suggests.

They looked at changes in biological age in humans and mice in response to various factors, including stress, according to the epigenetic clock, a tool that can accurately determine an individual's biological age.

Reversible changes

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.

"The results revealed that biological age may increase over relatively short time periods in response to stress, but this increase is transient and trends back toward baseline following recovery from stress," reads the study news release.

According to the researchers, these modifications only occur over a few days, possibly a few months, and show that biological age is not just associated with the passage of time in other words with chronological age but also how each individual's experience of stress, or other external factors, can play a role in the aging (or not) 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 School of Medicine.

"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. Critically, the triggers of such changes were also unknown."

Managing stress to manage biological aging

The researchers hypothesized and substantiated that other factors could also have an impact on the acceleration of the body's aging process.

They observed "transient changes in biological age" that occurred during major surgery, during pregnancy, or related to severe forms of Covid-19, again in humans and in mice.

For example, the scientists observed an increase in the biological age of pregnant women, which then returned to a 'normal' level following childbirth, again reflecting the reversible nature of these changes.

"The findings imply that severe stress increases mortality, at least in part, by increasing biological age. This notion immediately 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 aging and longevity," says co-senior study author Vadim Gladyshev of Harvard Medical School.

Learning to manage stress could thus have an effect on the aging 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 succeeded in highlighting short-term fluctuations in biological age in response to a variety of factors, including stress, but the researchers believe that more work is now needed to learn about the impact this could have over a lifetime.

A previous study, published in June 2022 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), had already shown that stress could indirectly participate in accelerating the aging 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 aging.