Aging is a strange thing. You go on living, enjoying your middle-aged life, finally feeling like a real adult, when one day you look in the mirror and gasp.
“Where are these Fold come from?”
“Is that skin on my arm…crepey?!?”
“Why am I Pains so?”
Somewhere in your mid-40s, you start noticing obvious signs of aging that seem to appear overnight. You assume it’s a gradual process that you just didn’t notice, but damn it feels like it happened really quickly.
New research suggests that this may well be the case. A study by researchers at Stanford tracked thousands of different molecules in people between the ages of 25 and 75 and found that people tend to make two big jumps in age—one at around age 44 and another at around age 60. These findings suggest that aging can indeed occur in spurts.
“We’re not just changing gradually over time. There are some really dramatic changes,” said lead study author Michael Snyder, Ph.D., a geneticist and director of the Center for Genomics and Personalized Medicine at Stanford University. “It turns out that the mid-40s is a time of dramatic change, as is the early 60s. And that’s true no matter what class of molecule you’re looking at.”
The researchers assumed that the changes starting in the mid-40s were due to menopause or perimenopausal changes in women affecting the overall numbers. However, when they broke the results down by gender, they found similar changes in men in their 40s.
“This suggests that while menopause or perimenopause may contribute to the changes seen in women in their mid-40s, there are likely other, more significant factors influencing these changes in both men and women. Identifying and investigating these factors should be a priority in future research,” said study author Xiaotao Shen, PhD, a former postdoctoral fellow at Stanford Medicine who now teaches at Nanyang Technological University Singapore.
Scientists have discovered that aging occurs in phases.Photo by Tristan Le/Pexels
The study involved 108 participants who gave blood and other samples every few months for several years. Scientists tracked age-related changes in 135,000 different molecules – nearly 250 billion different data points – to see how aging occurs.
The study could shed light on the reasons for the increase in certain diseases and illnesses at certain ages. Among 40-year-olds, the scientists found significant changes in molecules related to alcohol, caffeine and lipid metabolism, cardiovascular disease, and skin and muscles. Among 60-year-olds, changes were found related to carbohydrate and caffeine metabolism, immune regulation, kidney function, cardiovascular disease, and skin and muscles.
However, the study authors pointed out that lifestyle may play a role in some of these changes. For example, alcohol metabolism may be affected by people drinking more in their 40s, which is a time of higher stress for many people. However, the researchers added that these ageing spurts in the mid-40s and early 60s suggest that people at this age should pay more attention to their health and make lifestyle changes to improve their overall health, such as by exercising more or drinking less alcohol.
The research team wants to investigate the causes of these ageing spurts to find out why they occur at this age. But whatever the reasons, it is nice to know that the seemingly sudden onset of age-related ailments is not just a figment of our imagination.
It’s understandable to be concerned about aging, because the physical signs of aging remind us of our own mortality. Plus, society feeds us all kinds of messages telling us that youth is ideal and beautiful and old age is bad and ugly. So, naturally, we view aging with suspicion. But none of us can escape aging entirely. The more positive and healthy we are about aging, the better off we will be, no matter when and to what extent aging hits us.
