Inequality, decay of democratic institutions linked to accelerated ageing

Summary

A woman living in a town with heavy air pollution in South Africa, where people tend to age faster than in other countries. Air pollution is a risk factor for faster ageing.Credit: Per-Anders Pettersson/GettySocial inequality and weak democratic institutions are linked to faster ageing, as are other environmental features such as high levels of air pollution, finds a study spanning four continents1. Education was one of the top factors that protected against faster ageing.The study also showed that ageing is accelerated by less-surprising factors such as high blood pressure and heart disease. But the link to social and political influences could help to explain why rates of ageing vary from country to country, the authors say.How quickly are you ageing? What molecular ‘clocks’ can tell you about your health“It’s a very important study”, says Claudia Kimie Suemoto, a geriatrician at the University of São Paulo in Brazil who was not involved in the work. “It gives us the global perspective of how these dependent factors shape ageing in different regions of the world.”Political polarization and uncertainty mean that “we are living in a world of despair”, and that ages people, says lead author Agustín Ibañez, who directs the Latin American Brain Health Institute in Santiago. “We don’t think about the health impacts that this is going to have in the long run.”The study was published today in Nature Medicine.Age gapsThe study included 161,981 participants from 40 countries: 7 in Latin America, 27 in Europe, 4 in Asia and 2 in Africa. Just the process of harmonizing these data sets — such as checking that variables were measured in similar ways in different countries — took about 3 years, says Ibañez.The researchers examined previous research to identify possible factors that hasten or slow ageing and that could be compared across countries. They fed data of these factors into a machine-learning model that predicts a person’s chronological age. That allowed them to calcula...