A new study suggests that a person’s mental health affects ageing just as much as physical health.
Researchers from the Deep Longevity Limited in Hong Kong developed a deep learning ageing clock. An ageing clock is a statistical model that measures a person’s biological age instead of chronological age using blood, genetic and DNA data.
Researchers used this to measure the effect of both physical and mental health factors on the ageing of almost 12,000 Chinese adults from the CHARLS dataset.
Results showed that smoking represented the main physical factors while mental health issues accelerated a person’a ageing by 1.65 years – a rate higher than smoking.
Fedor Galkin, lead study author, said: “Quite frequently, mental health therapies are thought to only make you ‘feel good’, but according to our study, they can tangibly extend your life.
“If brought to the attention of [governments] or large organisations with millions of customer, using such studies as ours to create new policies can lead to the addition of eons of human life-years to the global economy.
“I hope that this new line of reasoning will persuade such large entities to pay more attention to the mental health and longevity fields.”
