If you’re tracking developments in aging research, don’t miss the issue of National Enquirer that hit newsstands today (dated Feb. 28)—it contains a full-page spread based on the Ashton-Demi Gerontology Seminar on the Beach that graced celebrity news outlets last week. You might also want to take a look at the related piece I did for Fortune‘s online version, which explores why so many Hollywood stars seem to age well and stay remarkably vibrant late in life. In brief, my speculative answer to that question is that actors tend to be especially resilient people, and that high-end resilience tends to go hand-in-hand with slow aging.
I didn’t have the space in my Fortune piece to delve into the deep, fascinating question it raised—why might resilience abet graceful aging—and so I decided to take it up here. I’ll get right to the point: I think highly resilient, stress-resistant people tend to be quite literally less inflamed as they age than most of us. Let me explain.
In recent years one of the most intriguing developments in psychiatric research has been the discovery that signs of heightened body-wide inflammation are closely associated with chronic stress and depression. This has been more than a little surprising, given that stress has long been regarded as suppressing the immune system, as well as dampening inflammation (which helps rev up immune cells to fight off infections).
But the tie between revved-up inflammation and stress/depression has now been shown in numerous studies, and it can’t be dismissed as a weird anomaly. A possible explanation for the paradox is that moderate stress of limited duration does indeed suppress the immune system, perhaps as part of an evolved mechanism to free up bodily resources to flee or fight when danger threatens. But chronic stress may overactivate mechanisms whose normal function is to damp down the red-alert state after danger has passed. Eventually this compensatory overactivation may produce an effect that’s just the opposite of the one that short-lived, moderate stress does on inflammation. This is by no means the only explanation, though I think it’s the most compelling one—another idea that’s been floated is that overeating and obesity go with depression, especially in women, and obesity is well known to be pro-inflammatory.
Regardless of why the inflammation-depression connection exists, it has highly interesting implications for psychiatry and other fields of medicine. For instance, it can explain why administration of vaccines, which transiently induce inflammation, sometimes causes healthy, normal people to suddenly get depressed and anxious. Cancer patients given immune boosting drugs, which are pro-inflammatory, also sometimes get profoundly depressed. Signs of heightened inflammation are also linked to impaired sleep and fatigue in depressed patients. The connection may also explain why some depressed people tend to respond better to antidepressant drugs when the medicines are given with anti-inflammatory compounds such as aspirin, as well as data suggesting that anti-inflammatory omega-3 supplements have can have antidepressant effects. For more details on these phenomena, see this recent review.
What’s most interesting to me about the connection are its larger implications about aging. In recent years it has become abundantly clear that low-level inflammation lies at the heart of many diseases of aging, and also may be a major driver of the overall aging process that causes our risk of fatal diseases to soar as we get older. Thus, the discovery that chronic stress abets such inflammation carries implications that stretch across the entire medical literature, not just psychiatry.
All this also suggests a major reason (probably not the only one) why highly resilient people, possibly including many famous actors, may be relatively slow agers: Their upbeat temperaments may make them resistant to the pro-inflammatory effects of stress. Don’t despair, though, if you’re a gloomy Nordic type. Anti-inflammatory interventions may help those who aren’t blessed with great resilience or unusually sunny personalities—most of us, that is—age more gracefully, and perhaps more cheerfully, as well as counteract the physically damaging effects of chronic psychosocial stress. Such stress is an increasingly urgent issue as the population ages, partly because caregivers of loved ones with cancer, dementia, and other chronic diseases of aging often face heavy stress for many years of their lives—it’s often seems as if they are transferring some of their own life- and health-spans to elderly parents.
In keeping with these ideas, recent data from the fetchingly named “Heart and Soul Study” in California showed that heart-disease patients with relatively high blood levels of omega-3—which probably meant that they ate lots of fish or took fish-oil supplements—tended to have less wearing away of the telomeres in their white blood cells as they aged. Worn telomeres, which are protective end-caps on chromosomes, are a sign of cellular aging, and ground-down telomeres in white blood cells is regarded as a sign of immune-system aging, and possibly also an indicator that many other types of cells in the body are getting decrepit—scientists call such cellular decrepitude the senescent phenotype, and it’s thought to underlie everything from wrinkles to cancer.
So how to dampen chronic, low-level inflammation? I’m not recommending that you rush out and try these, but there are data suggesting that several dietary supplements, such as resveratrol (at some dose that isn’t clear) and omega-3 (at high doses of at least 2 grams a day), can have the desired effect, at least in some people. Aspirin and other anti-inflammatory medicines such as ibuprofen also deserve consideration. There’s some evidence to suggest that yoga and meditation can be anti-inflammatory too. Perhaps best of all is the anti-inflammatory effect of regular exercise and maintaining your weight in the normal range.
Will any of these help your inner Demi come forth as the years pass? I don’t know the answer, but I have to say that someday I hope one of the paparazzi takes close-up of Ms. Moore’s telomeres.
More on Demi, Ashton and Aging
If you’re tracking developments in aging research, don’t miss the issue of National Enquirer that hit newsstands today (dated Feb. 28)—it contains a full-page spread based on the Ashton-Demi Gerontology Seminar on the Beach that graced celebrity news outlets last week. You might also want to take a look at the related piece I did for Fortune‘s online version, which explores why so many Hollywood stars seem to age well and stay remarkably vibrant late in life. In brief, my speculative answer to that question is that actors tend to be especially resilient people, and that high-end resilience tends to go hand-in-hand with slow aging.
I didn’t have the space in my Fortune piece to delve into the deep, fascinating question it raised—why might resilience abet graceful aging—and so I decided to take it up here. I’ll get right to the point: I think highly resilient, stress-resistant people tend to be quite literally less inflamed as they age than most of us. Let me explain.
In recent years one of the most intriguing developments in psychiatric research has been the discovery that signs of heightened body-wide inflammation are closely associated with chronic stress and depression. This has been more than a little surprising, given that stress has long been regarded as suppressing the immune system, as well as dampening inflammation (which helps rev up immune cells to fight off infections).
But the tie between revved-up inflammation and stress/depression has now been shown in numerous studies, and it can’t be dismissed as a weird anomaly. A possible explanation for the paradox is that moderate stress of limited duration does indeed suppress the immune system, perhaps as part of an evolved mechanism to free up bodily resources to flee or fight when danger threatens. But chronic stress may overactivate mechanisms whose normal function is to damp down the red-alert state after danger has passed. Eventually this compensatory overactivation may produce an effect that’s just the opposite of the one that short-lived, moderate stress does on inflammation. This is by no means the only explanation, though I think it’s the most compelling one—another idea that’s been floated is that overeating and obesity go with depression, especially in women, and obesity is well known to be pro-inflammatory.
Regardless of why the inflammation-depression connection exists, it has highly interesting implications for psychiatry and other fields of medicine. For instance, it can explain why administration of vaccines, which transiently induce inflammation, sometimes causes healthy, normal people to suddenly get depressed and anxious. Cancer patients given immune boosting drugs, which are pro-inflammatory, also sometimes get profoundly depressed. Signs of heightened inflammation are also linked to impaired sleep and fatigue in depressed patients. The connection may also explain why some depressed people tend to respond better to antidepressant drugs when the medicines are given with anti-inflammatory compounds such as aspirin, as well as data suggesting that anti-inflammatory omega-3 supplements have can have antidepressant effects. For more details on these phenomena, see this recent review.
What’s most interesting to me about the connection are its larger implications about aging. In recent years it has become abundantly clear that low-level inflammation lies at the heart of many diseases of aging, and also may be a major driver of the overall aging process that causes our risk of fatal diseases to soar as we get older. Thus, the discovery that chronic stress abets such inflammation carries implications that stretch across the entire medical literature, not just psychiatry.
All this also suggests a major reason (probably not the only one) why highly resilient people, possibly including many famous actors, may be relatively slow agers: Their upbeat temperaments may make them resistant to the pro-inflammatory effects of stress. Don’t despair, though, if you’re a gloomy Nordic type. Anti-inflammatory interventions may help those who aren’t blessed with great resilience or unusually sunny personalities—most of us, that is—age more gracefully, and perhaps more cheerfully, as well as counteract the physically damaging effects of chronic psychosocial stress. Such stress is an increasingly urgent issue as the population ages, partly because caregivers of loved ones with cancer, dementia, and other chronic diseases of aging often face heavy stress for many years of their lives—it’s often seems as if they are transferring some of their own life- and health-spans to elderly parents.
In keeping with these ideas, recent data from the fetchingly named “Heart and Soul Study” in California showed that heart-disease patients with relatively high blood levels of omega-3—which probably meant that they ate lots of fish or took fish-oil supplements—tended to have less wearing away of the telomeres in their white blood cells as they aged. Worn telomeres, which are protective end-caps on chromosomes, are a sign of cellular aging, and ground-down telomeres in white blood cells is regarded as a sign of immune-system aging, and possibly also an indicator that many other types of cells in the body are getting decrepit—scientists call such cellular decrepitude the senescent phenotype, and it’s thought to underlie everything from wrinkles to cancer.
So how to dampen chronic, low-level inflammation? I’m not recommending that you rush out and try these, but there are data suggesting that several dietary supplements, such as resveratrol (at some dose that isn’t clear) and omega-3 (at high doses of at least 2 grams a day), can have the desired effect, at least in some people. Aspirin and other anti-inflammatory medicines such as ibuprofen also deserve consideration. There’s some evidence to suggest that yoga and meditation can be anti-inflammatory too. Perhaps best of all is the anti-inflammatory effect of regular exercise and maintaining your weight in the normal range.
Will any of these help your inner Demi come forth as the years pass? I don’t know the answer, but I have to say that someday I hope one of the paparazzi takes close-up of Ms. Moore’s telomeres.