Under-55s Are Biologically Ageing More Quickly

You might think that lifespans are getting longer and longer, but some experts think they’ve peaked. (In fact, UK life expectancies have dipped since the pandemic.)

And according to a new paper published in Nature Ageing, people born between 1950 and 1954 are experiencing slower biological ageing than later generations.

Speaking to Oncology Central, assistant porfessor Yin Cao, who co-authored the study, said: “Biological ageing isn’t just about the number of birthdays you’ve had — it reflects wear and tear happening inside the body at a cellular and molecular level. This can include changes that affect how cells and tissues function, such as chronic inflammation, weakening of the immune system and damage building up in cells over time.

“Our findings suggest that some younger adults may be experiencing these biological changes earlier than expected, and that this could be linked to the rising rates of cancers seen in younger generations.”

It comes after the BMJ Oncology found a “global surge in cancers among the under 50s over past three decades”.

This paper found that the bigger the gap between someone’s chronological age (years) and biological age, the higher the cancer risk.

This research used data from the UK Biobank, a long-standing project in which almost half a million participants have agreed to make their health data available to researchers, and the US’ National Institutes of Health’s (NIH) All of Us Research Program.

It involved information from over 154,000 UK young adults and more than 10,000 US participants.

Researchers worked out people’s biological age according to their systemic (whole-body) and organ-specific aging. They did this by looking at things like blood biochemistry markers and the levels of different kinds of proteins linked to certain organs.

Then, they compared participants’ biological ages to their chronological ones.

They found that people from the UK between 1965 and 1974 “had systemic aging that was 23% of one standard deviation higher compared with those born between 1950 and 1954”.

And those born between 1990 and 1999 “had systemic aging that was 92% of one standard deviation higher compared with those born between 1965 and 1969”.

Basically, that means older people’s biological ages seem closer to their chronological age.

That may matter because in this study, the faster biological ageing seen among younger groups was linked to 8% increased risk of early-onset cancers, particularly lung, gastrointestinal and uterine cancers.

And those with the most advanced biological ageing had a 15% higher risk compared to those with the least cellular wear and tear.

“If we can identify younger people with the highest cancer risk when they are still healthy, we can focus on prevention and early-detection strategies for the individuals who will benefit most from early interventions”, Cao told The University of Washington’s WashU Medicine.

Dr David Scott, director of Cancer Grand Challenges – which was involved with the research – added, “Right now, we don’t have a definitive answer to what’s driving the rise of early-onset cancers around the world, but studies like this are helping us piece together the bigger picture, showing that cancer may be influenced not just by changes inside individual cells, but by wider changes happening across the body as a whole.”