Woman relaxing outside
If you’ve ever gone through a stressful period of life, only to think how much older you looked on the other side, you may relate to the findings of a study out in the journal Cell today. But there’s some good news: While the study confirms that stress can have an aging effect, it also shows that recovery can reverse it. The research was a collaboration of a number of schools, including Harvard Medical School and Duke University.
“In the most fundamental sense,” the authors write in the new paper, “our data reveal the dynamic nature of biological age: stress can trigger a rapid increase in biological age, which can be reversed.”
The premise of the research is that chronological and biological age aren’t always the same. That is, the body of a 40-year-old (their chronological age) who’s lived an extremely healthy life might function more like a 35- or even 30-year-old person (i.e., this person’s biological age is younger than their chronological age). The reverse is true for someone who’s led a less-healthy life.
It’s also well known that stress can have an aging effect on the body in measurable ways – the question the researchers behind the current study wanted to get at was whether a recovery period after a stressful event could reverse this process.
To determine biological age, they used newer iterations of biological age-estimation tools, which generally rely on capturing changes at the epigenetic level (how gene expression is turned up or down, depending on circumstances). They measured biological age across a range of stressful and sometimes strange situations in mice and humans.
Again and again, they found that biological aging was amped up during the stressful situation – for instance, around the time of a serious surgery, severe Covid-19 infection, or even pregnancy. They also found that after the stressful event was over, aging was partly or completely reduced, on the order of months or even days.
“A clear pattern that emerged over the course of our studies is that exposure to stress increased biological age,” the authors write in their paper. “When the stress was relieved, biological age could be fully or partially restored.”
One interesting finding was that in the people recovering from severe Covid-19, one medication – an anti-inflammatory drug – was linked to faster age-recovery time. This, along with their other findings, led the authors to hint at the idea of therapeutic interventions such as an “anti-aging drug.” Since aging can be reversed, they write, “this implies both the existence of intrinsic mechanisms to reverse increased biological age and the opportunity to reverse transient increases in biological age therapeutically.”
They do point out that there are limitations to the study – it’s not clear, for instance, how this shorter-term aging and recovery pattern may or may not affect long-term aging. More research will be needed for that answer.
In the meantime, the study might suggest that the haggard look and feel we get after a particularly stressful period in life might not be forever. We just need to make sure we actually take the time to recover from it.