New AI-Based Study Suggests Unhappiness Could 'Age' Some People More Than Smoking

Artificial intelligence is being used to create a clock that can measure your biological age.

Some intriguing predictions were made by a recent attempt. The initial tests show that the impact of mental ill health could be more significant than physical diseases.

Just because two people have the same number of birthdays doesn't mean they are the same person.

By measuring certain aspects of a person's physical health, researchers hope to one day predict how young or old someone is.

If the forecast is correct, it will help experts understand why some people age faster than others.

Our mental and emotional state has not been included in previous clock-winding attempts.

The association between mental disorders and physical disease and death was found in a study of 2.3 million New Zealanders.

A history of mental health issues was associated with accelerated aging in midlife. The aging effect occurred a long time before other age-related diseases popped up.

Researchers in the United States and Hong Kong designed a computer program to create a clock that incorporates psychological health factors and blood markers.

The data from nearly 5,000 healthy adults in the China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Study (CHARLS) dataset was trained on and tested with data from another 7,000 people.

It's the first time researchers have trained an aging clock exclusively on a large Chinese group, and it's also the first time they've included mental health stressors.

The authors found that psychological factors, such as feeling unhappy or lonely, add up to 1.65 years to a person'sbiological age. The effect was greater than other demographic characteristics such as biological sex, living area, and smoking status.

The authors say that the psychological component should not be ignored in aging studies because of its impact on biological age.

The study was funded by a publicly traded company.

Cholesterol levels, body mass index, waist circumference, and blood pressure are included in this latest attempt.

The participants' psychological well-being data was based on eight feelings.

The simplified version of mental health would make the predictions of thebiological clock more conservative.

The clock correctly predicted that sick people were older than healthy people when it was tested on them.

The predicted age was not affected by these conditions. The aggregate impact of all the psychological variables put together accelerated aging by 1.65 years.

About 1.25 years of aging was added by smoking alone.

Smoking remains one of the leading risk factors for cancer and heart disease, despite the fact that the algorithm found it less of a risk than depression or loneliness.

According to the clock's predictions, if an unmarried person adds 0.35 years to their age, they will feel less happy, more sad, and have trouble sleeping.

According to the authors, low psychological well-being is the same as serious diseases and smoking.

Promoting mental health may be considered a potential anti-aging intervention with possible benefits.

There is a study in the journal Aging.