While it may be no shock that better standards of living affects how you age (surprise, if you work in an office you will age better than a Victorian chimney sweep who smokes 20 a day), the change is surprisingly noticeable over the course of just a few decades.
A study published in 2018 examined the changes in biological aging (from markers such as blood pressure and lung function) changed in relation to chronological age, between 1988 and 2010. They found that even in this short time frame, there were significant differences in aging, with more recent generations being biologically “younger” than those who came before them.
“Over the past 20 years, the biological age of the U.S. population seems to have decreased for males and females across the age range,” the team wrote in the study.
“However, the degree of change has not been the same for men and women or by age. Our results showed that young males experienced greater improvements than young females. This finding may explain why early adult mortality has decreased more for males than females, contributing to a narrowing of the gender mortality gap. Additionally, improvements were also larger for older adults than they were for younger adults.”
The study placed emphasis on lifestyle factors like smoking, which partly accounted for why the gap between the biological ages of men and women closed, as men began to smoke less and women caught up, plus medication use led to improvements in health.
