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People with a history of mental illness, including depression, bipolar disorder or anxiety, have blood indicators that indicate they are older than they really are.
According to new research presented at the European Congress of Psychiatry on Sunday, this may help explain why people with mental health problems they usually have shorter lives and are more likely to develop age-related diseases than the rest of the population.
Julian Mutz and Cathryn Lewis of King’s College London examined data on 168 blood metabolites from 110,780 people from the UK Biobank.
The team linked that data with details about the histories of people with mental illness and found that those who had a history of mental illness also had older metabolic profiles than would be predicted for their age, the report reported. Interesting Engineering.
“It is now possible to predict the age of people from the blood metabolites. We found that, on average, those who had a lifetime history of mental illness had a metabolite profile that made them older than their actual age.” he said researcher Julian Mutz at the congress, which took place in Paris.
“People with bipolar disorder, for example, had blood markers indicating that they were about two years older than their chronological age,” he said.
According to a press release, in addition to having generally shorter lives, people with mental illnesses have worse health.
Individuals with mental health problems often have an increasing tendency to develop diseases such as diabetes and heart conditions, which are likely to worsen with age.
One study 2019 revealed that people with mental health problems typically had an average life expectancy around 10 years lower for men and seven years shorter for women than the general population.
“Our results indicate that the bodies of people with mental health problems tend to be older than would be expected for an individual their age,” continued Julian Mutz.
The difference in health and life expectancy between people with mental health problems and the general population cannot be entirely explained by this, he said, but the accelerated biological aging may be a significant factor.
“If we manage to use these markers to monitor biological aging, this could change the way we monitor the physical health of people with mental illnesses and how we evaluate the effectiveness of interventions aimed at improving physical health”, he further argued.
“Understanding the mechanisms underlying accelerated biological aging may be crucial for the development of prevention and tailored treatments to address the growing difficulty of an integrated management of these diseases”commented Sara Poletti of Hspital San Raffaele in Milan, Italy, who was not involved in the investigation.
ZAP // 
