While stress from life events such as surgery, pregnancy, contracting COVID-19, and taking the vaccines can age a person biologically, the body is able to naturally reverse this and increase longevity, a new study from Harvard University has found.
While chronological age is defined by the number of years one has been alive, biological age represents how much one’s DNA has been altered by a chemical reaction called methylation.
This biological age is influenced by factors such as disease, lifestyle, and environmental factors.
A person can look and feel much younger than someone of the same chronological age if he or she is biologically younger.
Challenging the traditional view of aging, the Harvard team found that aging can be reversed upon recovery from stressful events.
“Traditionally, biological age has been thought to just go up and up, but we hypothesized that it’s actually much more dynamic,” the study’s lead author, Jesse Poganik of Brigham and Women’s Hospital from Harvard Medical School, said.
“Severe stress can trigger biological age to increase, but if that stress is short-lived, the signs of biological aging can be reversed.”
Poganik and her colleagues examined blood samples and methylation levels from elderly patients undergoing emergency surgery, pregnant women, and patients admitted to the ICU for COVID-19.
They found that psychological stress increased the biological age for several of the patients but returned to baseline after the surgery, birth, or hospital discharge.
“Our findings challenge the concept that biological age can only increase over a person’s lifetime and suggest that it may be possible to identify interventions that could slow or even partially reverse biological age,” senior author Vadim Gladyshev said.
Destroying Worn-Out Cells Extends Life
Scientists have shown that eliminating aged cells can turn back the biological clock.Senescent cells were killed off in mice over the course of six months. Compared with the control group of mice, whose senescent cells were allowed to build up, the test mice had better heart and kidney function. They were also more resilient to stress and more active, and had delayed cancer development.
In fact, there are many things we can do to minimize the effects time has on our biological clocks.
It may help to take rejuvenating supplements such as curcumin, collagen, and resveratrol and to eat a healthy diet full of vitamins, minerals, and compounds that are known to support the body. Exercise, get outside, and stay strong to reduce the risk of age-related injury that can lead to hip and knee replacement.
Shedding Off Years
The University of California–Los Angeles and the Australian National University jointly published a study in 2016 in the journal NeuroImage.The study’s subjects were 250 meditators and 50 nonmeditators, with an average age of 51.4 years in both groups.
For instance, 50-year-old meditators had the same brain age as a 42.5-year-old nonmeditator, and 60-year-old meditators had the same brain age as a 51-year-old nonmeditator in the control group.
Interestingly, in the meditators group, for each additional year of actual age above 50, the brain appeared to be one month and 22 days younger than the actual age on average.
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