Taking care of your mental health is as important as maintaining your physical health. New research stresses it even more as findings reveal that feeling unhappy, depressed, and lonely speeds up the process of ageing — even faster than smoking and certain diseases.
Everyone has an age based on their date of birth. But biological age is what determines how early you face severe diseases. Biological age or chronological age is determined with the help of the ageing of the body’s functions affected by genetics, lifestyle choices and other factors.
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According to The Guardian’s report, researchers claim to have created a digital model of ageing that reveals the importance of mental health. Fedor Galkin, a co-author of the study and lead scientist at the startup Deep Longevity in Hong Kong said, “Your body and soul are connected – this is our main message.”
Researchers at Deep Longevity, Stanford University and The Chinese University of Hong Kong wrote in the journal Aging-US report how they built an “ageing clock” based on data collected from 4,846 adult participants in 2015 as part of the China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Study (CHARLS). The 16 blood biomarkers, including cholesterol, glucose levels, participant’s sex and information about their blood pressure, body mass index and lung function measures were measured to see the chronological age progression in the hem.
The team compared the biological age predicted by the model with the actual age and the result suggested that on average, participants were about 5.7 years over or under their true age. The result was that the psychological factors such as feeling unhappy or being lonely add up to 1.65 years to the participant’s biological age.
The team also revealed that people who smoke are about 15 months older in terms of chronological age as compared to their nonsmoking peers. Moreover, it was reported that marriage lowers your chronological age by 7 months and people living in rural areas were 5 months older than their urban counterparts.
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