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I recently heard Professor Luigi Ferrucci, an expert on ageing, speak at my local university’s medical school. One line really stuck with me: “The next great step in ageing science will be understanding how lifestyle factors slow down ageing.”
That, to me, is the ultimate goal. If we can slow the ageing process, we could delay or shorten the time we spend living with age-related illnesses. In other words, we might stay healthy for longer and only experience those diseases in the last few years of life, feeling younger and better overall.
As Ferrucci gave his talk, a new study was being published showing that one of the most surprising factors influencing ageing is our social life. It turns out that staying connected to others could slow how fast we age.
We’ve known for a while that people with strong social ties tend to live longer and enjoy better health. What’s been less clear is how our social connections affect our bodies on a biological level.
In this new American study of more than 2,000 adults, researchers looked at the strength and consistency of people’s social connections – things like family relationships, involvement in community or religious groups, emotional support and how active they were in their communities.
They devised a measure called “cumulative social advantage” (CSA) – essentially, how socially connected and supported someone is. This was a step forward because most earlier studies looked only at single factors like marriage or friendship.
The researchers then compared CSA to different measures of ageing. They looked at biological age (based on DNA changes, known as “epigenetic clocks”), levels of inflammation throughout the body, and how people’s stress-related hormones – such as cortisol and adrenaline – were behaving.
They found that people with stronger social connections tended to show slower biological ageing and lower inflammation. However, there wasn’t much of a link between social life and short-term stress responses, though the researchers suggested that this might simply be because those are harder to measure.
