Aging is a strange thing. You think you’re progressing smoothly, enjoying middle age, feeling like you’ve finally become a real adult, and then one day you look in the mirror and your breath takes your breath away.
“Where did those wrinkles come from?”
“The skin on my arms is… wrinkly?!?”
“Why does it hurt so much?”
Once you hit your mid-40s, the telltale signs of aging start to appear seemingly overnight, and while you’d assume it was a gradual process and you just didn’t notice, it actually feels like it happened really quickly.
New research shows that that may be exactly the case. A study by Stanford University researchers 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 aging: one around age 44 and another around age 60. These findings indicate that aging can indeed happen suddenly.
“We don’t just change gradually over time. We see some really dramatic changes,” said study lead author Michael Snyder, PhD, a geneticist and director of the Center for Genomics and Personalized Medicine at Stanford University. “It turns out that your mid-40s are a time of dramatic change, as are your early 60s. And it’s the same no matter what class of molecule you look at.”
The researchers speculated that the changes in the mid-40s were due to menopause or peri-menopause in women that contributed to the overall numbers, but when they split the results 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 important factors influencing these changes in both men and women. Identifying and studying these factors should be a priority for future research,” said study author Xiaotao Shen, PhD, a former postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University School of Medicine who now teaches at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore.
Scientists have discovered that aging happens rapidly. Photo by Tristan Le/Pexels
The study included 108 participants who submitted blood and other samples every few months over several years, and scientists tracked age-related changes in 135,000 different molecules — roughly 250 billion different data points — to see how aging happens.
The study may shed light on why certain diseases and disorders spike at certain ages. In people in their 40s, the scientists found significant changes in molecules related to alcohol, caffeine, lipid metabolism, cardiovascular disease, and skin and muscle. In people in their 60s, they found changes related to carbohydrate and caffeine metabolism, immune regulation, kidney function, cardiovascular disease, and skin and muscle.
The study authors note that lifestyle may influence some of these changes. For example, alcohol metabolism may be affected by increased drinking in one’s 40s, a stressful time for many people. But the researchers add that the rapid aging from the mid-40s to early 60s suggests that people are paying more attention to their health at that age and want to make lifestyle changes that help improve their overall health, such as exercising more and drinking less alcohol.
The team plans to study the causes to understand why this sudden increase in aging occurs at these ages, but whatever the reason, it’s good to know that the sudden onset of age-related worries isn’t just a figment of our imagination.
It’s natural to worry about aging because the signs of aging remind us of our own mortality. We also naturally underestimate aging because of various societal messages that tell us that youth is ideal and beautiful, and old age is bad and ugly. But no one can avoid aging entirely, so the more positive and healthy our approach to aging, the better off we’ll be no matter when and how much aging hits us.
