Muhdo Longevity Research

Does Stress and Anxiety Age Us?

This is another unique finding by the team at Muhdo Health and a world’s first for science, as we have combined DNA methylation with genotype COMT rs4680, which is associated with neurotransmitters such as dopamine and serotonin.

Does anxiety cause you to age faster? And does having a certain genotype accelerate this process further still?

First, we need to establish how we measure age? If we were to measure age by time then nothing would technically age us, time is a constant neither slowing nor speeding up.

Therefore, we need to look at a marker of age that can be altered, our biological age. Measuring biological age through DNA methylation can give us a glimpse of the future:

We can therefore look and see if those that suffer with anxiety accelerate biological ageing and therefore accelerate their risk of mortality.

The Muhdo Health team have collected 1000s of biological age tests utilising DNA methylation across the Illumina EPIC 950k array and have made numerous discoveries, one of which we will share with you today.

So, does Anxiety Age us?

Well unfortunately the answer is a resounding Yes.

But we didn’t just analyse their DNA methylation we also analysed numerous genotypes associated with neurotransmitters such as serotonin.

Whilst many didn’t have much correlation to ageing, one did. The rs4680 genotype (COMT), linked with dopamine, with AA homozygotes being linked with higher dopamine and bigger “high’s and low’s”.

Reported Anxiety

Those who reported suffering anxiety had an accelerated biological age on average of 4.38 years but only if they were AA in rs4680.

Those who reported suffering anxiety had an accelerated biological age on average of 1.7 years if they were the more common AG genotype in rs4680 or GG in the rs4680.

Didn’t Report Anxiety

Those who didn’t report anxiety with AA in rs4680 had a non-significant change in biological age (0.4).

Those who didn’t report anxiety with AG/GG in rs4680 had a deceleration in biological age of -2.2 years.

What could this all mean?

It appears that anxiety causes an acceleration in biological ageing and as the genes analysed for biological age affect cancer, dementia and inflammation it can be said that anxiety has a foundational physical effect on the body which may lead to serious physical pathology if left untreated.

Having certain genotypes may hasten the effect that anxiety has on the physical self or/and having certain genotypes protect against the physical effects of anxiety.