The stress of bereavement may accelerate the aging process, according to researchers who found evidence that losing a loved one early in life had an impact long before people reach middle age.
Scientists spotted biological markers of faster aging in people who had lost a parent, partner, sibling or child, but the signs were absent in others who had not experienced the death of someone close to them.
The finding suggests bereavement and grief take their toll on the body’s tissues and potentially increase the risk of future health problems. But it also raises the prospect that counseling and effective social support could help in the aftermath of a death.
Photo: AFP
Allison Aiello, a professor of epidemiology at Columbia University in New York, said losing someone close was a “significant stressor” and a life experience consistently linked to poorer mental health, cognitive impairment, heart and metabolic problems and an earlier death.
“Our research reveals a significant association between experiencing losses from childhood through adulthood and biological signs of aging,” Aiello said.
The decline in tissue and organ function brought on by accelerated aging might explain in part why bereavement can have such an impact on health.
The researchers drew on data from the US National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health, which followed participants from their teenage years into adulthood. In particular, they looked at people who were bereaved before the age of 18, and from 19 to 43 years old.
Biological aging was assessed by analyzing people’s DNA for chemical changes that build up over the years. These epigenetic clocks can reveal whether a person’s biological age is older or younger than their chronological age, which has a bearing on disease risk in later life, Aiello said.
Among 3,963 people studied, nearly 40 percent had lost a loved one by adulthood. Those who experienced more bereavements had significantly older biological ages than those who had not lost people close to them.
Given the results, published in Jama Network Open, Aiello said research should now focus on whether helping the bereaved with counseling and coping strategies reduces the aging effect.
“These insights could inform clinical and public health approaches to improving health outcomes following a loss,” she said.
The study appears alongside separate work on the impacts of a healthy diet and added sugar on biological age. According to the research, women in the US who followed a vitamin and mineral-rich diet had a younger biological age than those on poorer diets. But even for the women who ate healthily, each gram of added sugar was linked to a rise in biological age.
“It’s the first demonstration of the effect of added sugars on our epigenetic aging,” said Elissa Epel, an author on the paper and professor in the department of psychiatry at the University of California, San Francisco.
The researchers analyzed food records from 342 Black and white women from northern California and compared them with healthy eating habits, such as the Mediterranean diet, which is rich in anti-inflammatory and antioxidant compounds.
Women who ate more healthily had a lower biological age, according to their epigenetic clocks, but the scientists saw faster biological aging in those who consumed foods with added sugar. The women in the study ate between 2.7g and 316g of added sugar a day.
“It appears … that both having a diet high in nutrients and low in added sugars matters,” said Barbara Laraia, a senior author on the study and professor of community health sciences at the University of California, Berkeley.
Dorothy Chiu, a postdoctoral scholar at the University of California, San Francisco, and first author on the paper, said she would expect similar effects in men.
Under UK guidelines, free sugars — those added to food and drinks, and found naturally in products such as honey and smoothies — should not make up more than 5 percent of daily calories, with adults having no more than 30g, equivalent to seven sugar cubes daily.
On April 26, The Lancet published a letter from two doctors at Taichung-based China Medical University Hospital (CMUH) warning that “Taiwan’s Health Care System is on the Brink of Collapse.” The authors said that “Years of policy inaction and mismanagement of resources have led to the National Health Insurance system operating under unsustainable conditions.” The pushback was immediate. Errors in the paper were quickly identified and publicized, to discredit the authors (the hospital apologized). CNA reported that CMUH said the letter described Taiwan in 2021 as having 62 nurses per 10,000 people, when the correct number was 78 nurses per 10,000
As we live longer, our risk of cognitive impairment is increasing. How can we delay the onset of symptoms? Do we have to give up every indulgence or can small changes make a difference? We asked neurologists for tips on how to keep our brains healthy for life. TAKE CARE OF YOUR HEALTH “All of the sensible things that apply to bodily health apply to brain health,” says Suzanne O’Sullivan, a consultant in neurology at the National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery in London, and the author of The Age of Diagnosis. “When you’re 20, you can get away with absolute
May 5 to May 11 What started out as friction between Taiwanese students at Taichung First High School and a Japanese head cook escalated dramatically over the first two weeks of May 1927. It began on April 30 when the cook’s wife knew that lotus starch used in that night’s dinner had rat feces in it, but failed to inform staff until the meal was already prepared. The students believed that her silence was intentional, and filed a complaint. The school’s Japanese administrators sided with the cook’s family, dismissing the students as troublemakers and clamping down on their freedoms — with
As Donald Trump’s executive order in March led to the shuttering of Voice of America (VOA) — the global broadcaster whose roots date back to the fight against Nazi propaganda — he quickly attracted support from figures not used to aligning themselves with any US administration. Trump had ordered the US Agency for Global Media, the federal agency that funds VOA and other groups promoting independent journalism overseas, to be “eliminated to the maximum extent consistent with applicable law.” The decision suddenly halted programming in 49 languages to more than 425 million people. In Moscow, Margarita Simonyan, the hardline editor-in-chief of the