Feeling old is on thing and looking old is another. A study of people who have been born within a year of one another has revealed a massive gap in the speed of their bodies aging.
The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences have associated traits such as weight, kidney function and gum health. There were some 38-year-olds who had been aging so rapidly and badly that their “biological age” was on the brink of retirement.
The next step the team would be taking to is find out what it really is that has affected the pace of ageing. This international research group has observed 954 people from the same town in New Zealand who had been born between 1972 and 1973. 18 types of different ageing related traits had been observed by scientists when the group of people turned 26, 32 and 38 years of age. The analysis demonstrated that at the age of 38, the people’s biological ages ranging from the late-20s to the ones who had been almost 60.
Prof Terrie Moffitt from Duke University in the US said, “They look rough, they look lacking in vitality.”
During the study, there are some people who had almost stopped ageing whereas the other gained almost about 3 years of biological age for every 12 months that went by. People who had older biological age tended to perform much worse in tests of brain function and had a weaker grip.
The biological age of most people had been with a few years of their chronological age and it is not exactly clear how the pace of biological ageing changes through life with these measures.
“Any area of life where we currently use chronological age is faulty, if we knew more about biological age we could be more fair and egalitarian.” Prof Moffitt said.
She has also made arguments that age may not be fair for those “working at their peak” who then had to retire.
The researchers have said that they were not expecting such differences so early and that these findings may assist the trial methods for slowing the pace of ageing and then eventually have implications for medicine.
“Eventually if we really want to slow the process of ageing to prevent the onset of disease we’re going to have to intervene with young people.” she added.
Dr Andrea Danese from King’s College London said, “I think it is surprising you can detect these changes in young people.This is the first step to detect factors that influence the rate of ageing… very early prevention [of diseases]may be one of the things we will be able to measure better.”
