Sadness and loneliness accelerate aging more than smoking???

Recently, a team of scientists found that compared with smoking, fragile mental states such as sadness and loneliness can accelerate aging. This means that any anti-aging method cannot ignore psychological factors. The relevant research has been published in the recent journal "Aging".

This is a really interesting study, focusing on the effects of emotions, which are difficult to quantify , and smoking, which is easy to quantify, on aging. It turns out that emotions are more likely to age people than smoking...

Today, let’s talk about how to measure aging and the impact of psychology and smoking on aging?

01. How to measure aging?

The aging here is not the natural age, but the physiological test. So what is the physiological age? For example, we often use Guo Degang and Lin Zhiying, who are of the same age, as a comparison to say that the actual aging of the same age is different, that is, the physiological age is different.

Here, the author uses the epigenetic method, which is also a relatively mature method, which is to use epigenetics to predict a person's physiological age.

For example, there was a review article in Nature that introduced the use of epigenetics to predict physiological age.

There are many studies in this area, and many methods have been summarized.

Generally speaking, physiological age is detected by detecting DNA epigenetics, mainly DNA methylation, which is the most common and easiest to detect epigenetics. In this article, the author also has a similar idea.

First, we used data from the China Health and Longevity Longitudinal Study.

Then 16 blood indicators, 7 physiological parameters and indicators were collected, including biological sex.

The following figure shows some indicators.

Next, through neural network learning, a set of measurement methods was established, namely the aging clock . It seems that this model is quite mathematical.

Based on their computational simulations in three populations, they found that the fit level was quite good, with an average absolute error of 5.68 years in age prediction.

Once the model was established, the research began.

02. Which has a greater impact on aging: psychology or smoking?

The data of the participating population is shown in the figure below:

It is mainly divided into psychological impact and daily life (smoking), such as some corresponding psychological options, such as misfortune (rarely feel happy), timidity (rarely fearful), etc.

After inputting these data and performing calculations, it was found that different factors have different effects on human aging. For example, differences were found in aspects related to diseases.

In the end, it was discovered that these different states do have different effects on people.

For example, as can be seen in the figure, poor psychological condition has the most obvious impact on physiological age, 1.65 years, followed by smoking, 1.25 years. In addition, if it is a man, this gender itself will make people age more easily. Of course, this is also a widespread discovery that men age more easily than women and die earlier than women. The long-lived elderly are basically dominated by women.

In addition, living in rural areas will also make people age more quickly, which is understandable. After all, the living environment, diet, and medical and health care in rural areas are relatively poor.

Finally, those who are single (never married) also age quickly.

This study is quite standard, but what is interesting is that it quantified the impact of psychological factors and found that it is more serious than smoking, which is indeed surprising.

So everyone, adjust your mood and don't be so anxious all day long.