April 25, 2023 – The measurement of biological aging has become so precise with DNA-based technology that researchers have shown that trauma or stressful life events can rapidly accelerate the rate of aging. But they also discovered that experience recovery can bring aging back to where it started.
This is one of the first studies to show that aging does not have to occur in only one direction. It may be too soon to destroy your AARP membership card, but the evidence in mice and humans looks promising.
“People just assumed that as you get older, your biological age goes with it. And that’s correct, but there are fluctuations,” said James Patrick White, PhD, co-senior author of the study and an assistant professor of medicine at Duke University in Durham, NC.
Although we all experience stressful events, their effect on aging can change rapidly.
“You may be stressed, you may have some trauma, whatever your stressor may be is accelerating [your aging]said White, who is also a senior fellow at the Center for the Study of Aging at Duke.
“The question was always: Well, are you stuck in there? And we are showing that this is not the case. You can back off a bit once the stressor is removed,” she said.
He study was published online on April 21 in the magazine Cellular metabolism.
turning back the clock
White, co-lead author Vadim N. Gladyshev, PhD, and colleagues found that pregnancy, suffering a hip fracture, and having severe COVID are traumatic or stressful enough to accelerate aging. By contrast, undergoing elective surgery did not accelerate aging in the short term.
The idea that aging is not a one-way street comes in part from experiments with mice. Joining two mice, one young and one old, so that they share the same blood circulation is a technique called parabiosis. The technique has been around for decades. But now, “the novelty here is that we show epigenetic acceleration. The young mouse gets older, the old mouse gets younger. And the cool thing is that when we separate the mice and remove the old blood, the young mouse reverses that.” . accelerated aging at their chronological age,” White said.
The research was made possible by advances in the measurement of DNA methylation. Researchers can now look at individual sites in DNA where methylation occurs in a predictable way over time. The sensitivity of these second-generation “DNA methylation clocks” has increased to the point that they can show changes in biological aging measured over days to weeks.
White and his colleagues used blood samples from older patients before emergency hip surgery, the morning after, and 4 to 7 days after recovery. They found significant increases in biomarkers of age. “Surprisingly, this increase occurred in less than 24 hours, and biological age returned to baseline 4 to 7 days after surgery,” the researchers noted.
They found that there were no significant changes in age biomarkers associated with elective colorectal surgery in other patients.
Not all stress is the same
In general, people’s aging process returns to its normal starting point after a stressor is removed. But there can be differences between people, some return to their previous chronological age completely, some partially, and some not at all.
“That opens the question of, ‘Why?’” White said.
For example, when they compared people who recovered from severe COVID, aging tended to pick up more among women than among men. The reason is unknown and could be examined in future studies.
Resilience counts too.
“I would imagine that if you can’t cope and the stress persists, you’ll accelerate biological aging and open yourself up to age-related issues, probably sooner than someone who can recover,” White said.
Another unknown is whether psychological and physical stress contribute equally to this acceleration of aging.
Aging is not a ‘continuous type of decline’
“I see this as a huge breakthrough,” said Florence Comite, MD, a Yale-trained precision medicine physician and founder of the Comite Center for Precision Medicine and Health in New York City, when asked for comment.
“I myself have always believed that aging does not occur in a constant state of decline,” she said. There are many issues going on below the surface, she continued, including changes in muscle, hormones, metabolism, and the way the body deposits visceral fat in different organ systems. Family history and genetics can also alter aging.
Comite thinks of aging “more as something that stops and starts…not some kind of steady, uninterrupted decline.”
“I think this will give us an opportunity to go deeper,” he said. “It’s just going to be the beginning of opening up the field.”
Committee is co-author of a study 2022 who looked at DNA methylation and COVID. The results showed that people over the age of 50 were more likely to have faster biological aging with COVID than younger people.
In general, the finding that people can reverse a negative effect of stress or trauma is positive.
“We have far more reserves than we think we have or take credit for,” White said.
Interventions to stop the acceleration of aging related to stress or trauma would likely work for people with chronic illnesses, chronic effects of disease, serious infections like COVID, or even cancer, Comite said. But they are unlikely to help people deal with the general stress of everyday life, she said.
In the future, the technology could also be used to see how well anti-aging drugs work.
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