Here’s how you can reverse your biological age, according to breakthrough new study

Your biological age is ticking, but this study shows how you can slow it down – and even turn it around.

By Noa Leach

Published: Monday, 24 April 2023 at 12:00 am

Humans can effectively de-age after recovering from stressful events, a new study from Harvard Medical School and Duke University School of Medicine has found.

The breakthrough research shows that while stress can significantly age a person biologically the body can naturally reverse this effect, lowering your chance of mortality.

“These results highlight our own resilience,” senior co-author Dr James White, from the Duke University School of Medicine, told BBC Science Focus: “We don’t give enough credit that the body can reset.”

While chronological age represents the number of years you have been alive, biological age is defined by how much your DNA has been altered by a chemical reaction called methylation.

Your biological age is influenced by factors like disease, lifestyle, environmental factors. Stress, whether physical or mental, has also been found to rapidly age a biological clock.

The new study, published in Cell Metabolism, shows that your biological age is much more flexible than your chronological age. In fact, people can be biologically older or younger than their chronological age.

The researchers say that the discovery that biological age is “fluid, fluctuating and malleable” challenges the long-held belief that it can only go up, like chronological age. This research is the first to explore the question of ageing being reversible in humans.

In the study, researchers challenged the theory that somebody’s biological age is overwhelming determined by their chronological age – that methylation levels change predictably over time. Methylation levels were measured in human participants following surgery, pregnancy, and severe cases of COVID-19.

The researchers found that methylation levels in participants were different from the predicted levels for their chronological age. This meant their biological age was lower or higher (depending on the amount of methylation in their DNA) than their chronological age.

Severe stress has been previously linked to higher mortality rates by increasing biological age due to increased susceptibility to stress-related diseases.

In the same way, the new study shows that reversing your biological age can decrease your mortality. According to Dr Vadim Gladyshev, co-senior author of the study, this suggests that “the ability to recover from stress may be an important determinant of successful ageing and longevity” – in other words, how well we grow old.

The results of the study suggest that your biological age may now also be a useful measure of your stress levels and how well you have recovered.

As the study shows that our bodies are able to induce this reversal naturally, it provokes questions as to whether we might be able to reverse our age below the recovery baseline.

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Does recovering from stress – and reversing your biological age – make you visibly less old?

It’s almost a yes from Dr White, who says that “we wear stress, and I imagine that would translate to a physiological response”.

But is the kind of bad day that gives you dark circles under your eyes enough to accelerate biological ageing as much as surgery or, say, pregnancy? “Probably not”, says White. “But if you are stressed for months or years, that might be enough”.

It’s one of the key questions that the researchers are taking forward: how stressed you need to actually be before you accelerate your biological age – and therefore have the need to reduce it again. It also remains unclear whether we can bring down accelerated ageing over a longer time period.

If we want to help ourselves recover from stress, what should we do?

While the study did not pursue whether recovery must be active or passive, White speculates that a combination of physical and mental rest is important to recovery – and if either is lacking then the other will be limited.

Recovery is mostly a passive process, according to White, but an often-neglected aspect of recovery is the mental side which some people might need extra help with. For example, if you start walking again after surgery some people think “you must be better” – but it is important not to ignore the psychological aspect of recovery.

The results also showed some variability that suggests that some people might be better at recovering than others.