Mental Illness May Speed Up the Aging Process, Study Finds

Mental illness is a notorious thief, stealing joy, peace, and ease from the estimated one billion people worldwide who suffer from it. Now, it appears that mental illness steals still more too: years and youth. According to new research presented Mar. 26 at the European Congress of Psychiatry in Paris, people suffering from a range of psychiatric conditions—particularly depression, bipolar disorder, and anxiety—carry markers in their blood indicating that their biological age is older than their chronological age. The findings, presented by Julian Mutz, a post-doctoral research associate at King’s College London, were based on a robust survey he and his colleagues conducted of more than 110,000 blood samples maintained at the UK Biobank, a large-scale biomedical database containing blood and genetic samples from more than half a million U.K. residents. The samples are cross-indexed with the donors’ age, gender, and medical history, providing a detailed portrait of the overall health of a representative sampling of the U.K. population. [time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”] Mutz and his colleagues used the biobank data to study blood for 168 different metabolites, including cholesterol, fatty acids, inflammatory markers, and more, all of which can indicate a person’s biological age. “Some of those markers increase with age,” says Mutz, “some decrease, and some have a nonlinear relationship, so they would increase for a numb...
Source: TIME: Health - Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Tags: Uncategorized healthscienceclimate Mental Health Source Type: news