Health and Medicine
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New research has shown that people with various different mental disorders have increased biological markers of aging, indicating that they are physically aging at a faster rate.
The rest of this article is behind a paywall. Please sign in or subscribe to access the full content.People with mental illness typically show more age-related disorders and have shortened lifespans, though research until now has failed to highlight exactly why. While severity varies by individual and the mental illness in question, anxiety, depression, bipolar disorder and more have been linked to significantly shorter lifespans and the tendency to develop diabetes and heart conditions. The effect is larger for males, who can expect a shorter lifespan of around 10 years, while it is around seven years for women, according to a 2019 study.
The new research from King’s College London, presented at the European Congress of Psychiatry, analyzed a huge dataset of 110,780 patients from the UK Biobank and checked for 168 different blood metabolites that act as markers for age. They aimed to identify whether the correlation between a lifetime history of mental illness and a shorter lifespan had a biological basis or could be explained by other means, taking this data and checking it against patient data on mental illness.
The results showed that people with a history of mental illness had biological metabolite profiles that indicated they were older than they actually were, going some way to explain why they typically show more age-related diseases and die earlier.
“It is now possible to predict people’s age from blood metabolites. We found that, on average, those who had a lifetime history of mental illness had a metabolite profile which implied they were older than their actual age. For example, people with bipolar disorder had blood markers indicating that they were around 2 years older than their chronological age,” said lead researcher Dr Julian Mutz in a statement.
The work not only validates existing research into a biological basis for the onset of these diseases as a result of mental illness, but also looks to improve the management of the diseases themselves by possibly treating some of the underlying causes. If the mechanism behind this aging can be identified, it could lead to another treatment avenue for people with mental illnesses.
“This is an important work as it gives a possible explanation for the higher prevalence of metabolic and age-related diseases in patients with mental illness. Understanding the mechanisms underlying accelerated biological ageing could be crucial for the development of prevention and tailored treatments to address the growing difficulty of an integrated management of these disorders,” said Dr Sara Polett, who was not involved in the work.
