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Biological Aging May Be a Risk Factor for Depression, Anxiety
Biological aging, as opposed to chronological, may be a risk factor for incident depression/anxiety in midlife and for older adults, according to recent study results published in the journal Nature Communications.
“Under the circumstances of population aging, increased attention to the prevention and treatment of depression/anxiety disorders in older adults is a public health priority,” authors noted. “Interventions to slow biological aging, beginning from midlife, may represent on the path to reducing the burden of disease.”
Related: Which intervention is most effective for treatment-resistant depression?
Researchers aimed to explore whether biological aging contributes to poor mental health in late life by evaluating the prospective association between biological age and incident depression and anxiety in 424,299 participants from the UK Biobank. The researchers measured biological age from clinical traits using the Klemera-Doubal method Biological Age (KDM-BA) and PhenoAge algorithms as well as with participant-provided information on their lifestyle and health. Participants with depression and/or anxiety at baseline were excluded from the study.
During a median follow-up of 8.7 years, researchers found that participants with an older biological age were at an increased risk of incident depression/anxiety. The risk increased by 5.9% per standard deviation of KDM-BA acceleration and 11.3% per standard deviation of PhenoAge acceleration. Furthermore, the biological-aging-associated risk of depression/anxiety was independent of and additive to genetic risk measured by genome-wide-association-study-based polygenic scores.
“Findings suggest future directions for depression/anxiety risk assessment in older adults as well as the potential for therapies that target the biology of aging to contribute to the prevention of later-life depression/anxiety,” authors concluded.
Researchers noted that the self-reported data used to measure depression/anxiety could be subject to recall bias and may have limited the study results. The study also did not explore the mechanisms that underlie the association between biological age and depression/anxiety, which could be a limitation, according to authors.
