Stress Ages You but Can Be Reversed: Study
While stress such as surgery, pregnancy, COVID-19, and the vaccines themselves can significantly age a person biologically, the body is able to naturally reverse this effect and increase longevity, a new study from Harvard University has found.
While chronological age is defined by the number of years you have been alive, biological age represents how much your DNA has been altered by a chemical reaction called methylation.
This biological age is influenced by factors like disease, lifestyle, and environmental factors.
According to a recent British study, the original COVID-19 virus can impair cognitive ability in a way equivalent to making the brain age by two decades.
Researchers from Saint Louis University in Missouri also discovered in a study published in the Journal of Virology in 2021, that the spike proteins in vaccines increase inflammatory factors, cause mitochondrial damage, produce misfolded proteins, and cause genomic instability, all of which accelerate cellular aging.
Challenging the traditional view of aging, the team from Harvard Medical School 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,” lead author Jesse Poganik 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.
“When stress was relieved, biological age could be restored. This means that finding ways to help the body recover from stress could increase longevity.”
Destroying Worn-out Cells Extends Life
Scientists have shown in earlier studies that eliminating aged cells can reverse the biological clock.
Published in Nature in February 2016, the article “Destroying worn-out cells makes mice live longer” showed that eliminating senescent cells in mice extended their lifespans by 20 percent to 30 percent.
Senescent, or aging, cells were killed off in mice over six months. Compared to the control group of mice whose senescent cells were allowed to build up, the mice were healthier with better heart and kidney function. They were also more resilient to stress, more active, and had delayed cancer development.
In fact, there are many things we can do to minimize the effects time plays on our biological clocks.
It may help to take rejuvenating supplements such as curcumin, collagen, and resveratrol while eating 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.
Reducing stress with high-quality sleep and meditation practice is noted to slow down our biological clock.
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 non-meditators, both groups with an average age of 51.4 years.
The researchers analyzed and compared the brain ages of the two groups and found that the brain age of the meditators was younger than their actual age.
For instance, 50-year-old meditators had the same brain age as a 42.5-year-old non-meditator, while 60-year-old meditators had the same brain age as the 51-year-old non-meditators in the control group.
Interestingly, for the meditators over 50, each additional year of their actual age would make their brain age one month and 22 days younger than their actual age.
Research on meditation continually shows that although the body appears motionless in meditation, enormous changes are undergoing in the genes.
