The stress of bereavement can accelerate the aging process, according to researchers who found evidence that losing a loved one early in life had an impact long before people reached middle age.
Scientists have seen biological markers of faster aging in people who have 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 that mourning and grief take their toll on the body’s tissues and may increase the risk of future health problems. But it also raises the prospect that counseling and effective social support can help in the aftermath of a death.
Allison Aiello, a professor of epidemiology at Columbia University in New York, said the loss of someone close is 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 shows a significant link between losses from childhood through adulthood and biological markers of aging,” Aiello said. The decline in tissue and organ function caused by accelerated aging may partly explain 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 affects disease risk in later life, Aiello said.
Among 3,963 people studied, nearly 40% lost a loved one by adulthood. Those who experienced more bereavement had significantly older biological ages than those who did not lose 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 can inform clinical and public health approaches to improving health outcomes after a loss,” she said.
The study appears next to it separate work on the impact of a healthy diet and added sugar on biological age. According to the research, women in the US who followed a diet rich in vitamins and minerals had a younger biological age than those on poorer diets. But even for the women who ate healthily, every gram of added sugar was linked to an increase in biological age.
“This is 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 of 342 black and white women from Northern California and compared them to healthy eating habits, such as the Mediterranean diet, which is rich in anti-inflammatory and antioxidant compounds.
to newsletter promotion
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 per day.
“It appears … that both a diet high in nutrients and low in added sugars matter,” said Barbara Laraia, a senior author of 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 drink and found naturally in products such as honey and smoothies – should make up no more than 5% of daily calories, with adults having no more than 30g, equivalent to to seven sugar cubes daily.
