Death of A Loved One Accelerates Brain Aging
The loss of a friend, parent, relative, partner is always a great grief, which every person experiences with difficulty. It affects the mental state, in some cases even causing psychological trauma, but in addition, the bitterness of loss can also affect physical health, accelerating the aging process at the biological level.
No one is ever prepared for the loss of loved ones. And the consequences of the unexpected departure of a loved one can be more serious than it seems.
Each of us experiences grief in our own way: some of us may become more withdrawn or, on the contrary, open and ready to communicate, others begin to experience difficulties with concentration and memory, others suddenly suffer from insomnia, headaches and other physical symptoms.
Sooner or later they will all subside and we will be able to return to normal life, but the imprint on the DNA will still be left.
How the loss of loved ones affects health
For the first time, a team of scientists led by Alison Aiello from Columbia University decided to trace the impact of the loss of loved ones on physical health.
The researchers studied the materials of the National multi-year study, which began in 1994. In total, it involved about 20,000 people of different ages, each of whom for two decades filled out a questionnaire, noting their mental state, ethnicity, gender, wealth, family size, education level and bad habits.
But the scientists were not interested in all volunteers, but only those who reported the loss of a loved one(s) in the past few years – that’s 40% of the total number of participants.
Some of these subjects agreed to donate blood for analysis, and then the scientists began to develop a method of calculating biological age.
Biological age is an indicator of the stage of morphological and physiological development of a particular organism. It is determined by the totality of metabolic, structural, functional, regulatory features and adaptive capabilities of the organism and can differ from chronological and even psychological age.
The whole work took about six years, and eventually the researchers used a model based on linear regression: it can predict the relationship between the number of experienced deaths of loved ones and biological age, taking into account various variables.
In addition, the results showed that experiencing the death of a loved one at an older senior age imposes a greater impact on a person’s physical well-being. What this paradox is related to is still unclear. In any case, the researchers will dig deeper in this direction, as their findings may contribute to the creation of methods to protect the body from the consequences of premature loss of loved ones.
Source: Death of A Loved One Accelerates Brain Aging
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