Loneliness could age you faster than smoking, a new study finds

It’s already a well-known fact that loneliness can be bad for your mental health.

But it can also affect your physical health — specifically, speeding up your body’s aging process.

That’s according to a new study that found loneliness increases people’s biological age more than regular smoking.

The study used a deep-learning “aging clock” to test blood and biometric data from nearly 12,000 Chinese adults.

The researchers behind the study, led by biotechnology company Deep Longevity, said they were surprised to see the impact psychological factors could have on aging compared to established physical factors like smoking habits.

What is an aging clock?

An aging clock is a statistical model that measures biological age rather than chronological age — which is how old a person actually is based on their date of birth.

The watch generated an age prediction by looking for a combination of 16 blood biomarkers, seven biometric parameters and the participant’s biological sex.

“An aging clock is a digital model of aging trained on thousands of human samples,” Fedor Galkin, senior scientist at Deep Longevity, told Euronews Next.

“It learns to recognize the signs of aging by examining biomarker profiles tagged with chronological age. Then it can estimate a person’s age by looking at their biomarkers,” he said.

“It turns out that when a person is recognized as old by this model, their molecular aging processes are accelerated. This property can be used to prevent the onset of age-related diseases or find ways to slow down aging.”

The researchers said the key predictors of aging were blood pressure, cystatin C (a protein that signals kidney health), body mass index (BMI) and spirometry (lung capacity).

After analyzing data from 11,914 Chinese adults, the watch found that smoking prolonged aging by about 1.25 years.

However, feelings of loneliness could prolong aging by 1.65 years.

However, it was not just this feeling that contributed to this acceleration of aging, but rather a whole range of psychological factors designed to measure well-being, including anxiety, hopelessness, depression, dissatisfaction and poor sleep.

It also found that those who had never married aged 0.35 years longer because of their single status, while people living in rural areas aged 0.39 years longer.

“Mental health is a key driver of aging”

“There is a great deal of research out there on how mental and physical health are related, including their concomitant aging processes,” Galkin said.

“The surprising thing is that, unlike in some other research projects, this connection can be observed using very simple data types. Another surprise is how powerfully psychological parameters can be compared to an established pro-aging factor like smoking.”

Manuel Faria, another author of the paper, argued that “mental and psychosocial conditions are some of the most robust predictors of health outcomes – and quality of life – but have been largely overlooked in modern healthcare.”

The psychological aspect of aging should not be neglected either in research or in practical anti-aging applications.

The authors concluded that given the strong association between mental health conditions and aging, poor mental health needs to be recognized as a major reason for aging.

“This study lays the groundwork for the new tools that can help reverse both psychological and biological aging while improving well-being,” said Alex Zhvaoronkov, founder and CEO of Insilico Medicine and co-author of the publication.

“Both organizations and governments would benefit from increased productivity and reduced healthcare costs due to psychosocial and biological age optimization.”

That study published in the journal Aging-US.