Aging due to stress is reversible. According to a new stud study, one will return to baseline levels after recovering from stressors.
Biological Aging Due to Stress Is Reversible
An expanding corpus of research, including a recent study, indicates that our biological age, which differs from a person's chronological age, may be reversible.
Researchers from several countries discovered biological age markers that seemed to rise after stressful situations like major surgery, pregnancy, or serious infection and then drop back to baseline levels after the stressors had passed, ScienceAlert reported.
According to the researchers' findings, stress exposure led to a rise in biological age, which became a definite pattern throughout their investigation.
Depending on how much stress had been present, biological age may have entirely or partially returned. The recent study of how biological aging alters in response to a major surgery may best illustrate it.
For some in the medical and health industries, slowing down or even reversing aging effects is unattainable.
Research in this area is appealing because of our expanding understanding of the natural malleability of DNA, to which chemical tags are added or deleted by cells, affecting the way genes are expressed.
These so-called epigenetic alterations may result from a person's exposure to dietary deficiencies, infections, or stress during childhood or later in life, as well as lifestyle and environmental influences.
In this manner, epigenetic modifications serve as a molecular "clock" that measures the passage of time and can be used to compare the biological age of tissues and organs to a person's chronological age.
The length of telomeres, the protective caps on the end of chromosomes that decrease each time cells divide, can also be used by scientists to determine biological age.
Studies on telomeres have demonstrated how stress on new doctors or having several pregnancies might cause cells to age more rapidly than they should.
Examples of Reversing Biological Aging
Elderly trauma patients requiring emergency surgery had spikes in biological age markers in their blood samples, which went back to normal a week later.
Results from mice that had been surgically linked and then separated were shown by this pattern. However, patients who chose elective surgery did not exhibit any evidence of hastened aging.
The researchers analyzed different epigenetic clocks because it can be challenging to distinguish a signal from noise among the millions of cells that are always humming with activity. Interestingly, some people saw no changes.
The scientists believe their research indicates that the body can reverse biological aging processes. However, observing changes in body functions is one thing; attempting to use them therapeutically to slow down the impacts of aging is quite another.
They don't yet know if these transient alterations in cellular aging have any long-term or discernible health impacts, but the human body is capable of many amazing feats that contemporary medicine can scarcely mimic.
In the past, studies on longevity focused on strategies to lengthen telomeres, which could help animals live longer. But more recently, the search for strategies to turn back epigenetic clocks has taken center stage.
Molecular biologist Vadim Gladyshev of Harvard Medical School and co-author of the new study said despite the broad acceptance that biological age is at least somewhat flexible, it is unknown how much biological age changes over time and what circumstances cause these changes.
The results of the study were published in Cell Metabolism.
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