Research results that `` unhappiness and loneliness '' age people more than smoking



Previous research has shown that ``

the misfortune of losing property has a great impact on health, '' and it is also said that `` being lonely is a danger signal from the body .'' A study to measure the impact of such unhappiness and loneliness on human aging with an `` aging clock '' created using AI found that unhappiness has a stronger effect on aging than smoking.

Psychological factors substantially contribute to biological aging: evidence from the aging rate in Chinese older adults | Aging
https://doi.org/10.18632/aging.204264

Aging | Psychological substantially factors c | EurekAlert!
https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/966681

Unhappiness Could 'Age' Some People More Than Smoking, Study Suggests : ScienceAlert
https://www.sciencealert.com/new-ai-based-study-suggests-unhappiness-could-age-some-people-more-than-smoking

The 'aging clock' that many researchers are working on is a statistical model for measuring a person's biological age. A normal age is determined automatically from the date of birth, but an aging clock is created by training an algorithm to estimate the strength of a person's aging phenomenon based on parameters such as blood tests and genetic analysis. increase.



A research team in the United States and China funded by Deep Longevity, one of the aging clock development companies, has developed a new aging clock that considers psychological factors in addition to conventional physical data. I did research to The algorithm was trained using data from 4846 Chinese over the age of 45 included in

the Longitudinal Study of Health and Retirement in China (CHARLS) .

Regarding the reason for adopting the data of Chinese elderly people as the research subject, the research team said in the paper, At 15.7%, it is the lowest among East Asian countries, lower than Japan's 29.2% and South Korea's 25.25%.However, China has a large population, and China's population aged 65 and over far exceeds that of Europe as a whole. It is much more than we expected, so understanding China's aging population has important implications for the aging of the world.'

The data collected by the research team from CHARLS participants can be roughly divided into two types: physical data and psychological factors. The latter includes 8 types of psychological factors, such as marital status, smoking habits, feelings of loneliness and unhappiness.

When we tested the aging clock, which was created by training the algorithm with these data, with the data of about 7,000 people included in CHARLS, we found that people with diseases such as cancer, heart disease, liver disease, lung disease, and stroke It was confirmed that those with hypertension were older on the aging clock than healthy subjects, but the effects were all ≤1.5 years. However, the effect of psychological factors on age was greater than these diseases, and was equivalent to aging for up to 1.65 years. This means that psychological factors age people more than factors such as 1.25 years of smoking.



The results do not indicate that unhappiness poses a higher health risk than diseases such as cancer or smoking. However, since the influence of psychological factors was stronger than the age of 0.59 for 'unmarried' and 0.44 for 'sleep disorder', the research team concluded that ``the harmful effects of low psychological well-being are , has been demonstrated to be on par with serious illness and smoking.'

From this point of view, the research team said, ``Promoting mental health may be an anti-aging therapy that can be expected to be as effective as physical treatment approaches.'' They concluded that happiness is also an essential factor in becoming a “successful elderly person”.

in Science, Posted by log1l_ks