According to a new study, depression can accelerate cellular aging and lead to premature death.
Severe Depression Disorder (MDD) has previously been found to be a risk factor for many different aging-related diseases, including cardiovascular disease, Alzheimer’s disease, and osteoporosis; it is also associated with early deaths. This is how researchers have assumed depression can cause a biological process in the body that accelerates aging, according to the study published in the journal on April 6 Translational Psychiatry.
“One of the things that is noticeable about depression is that sufferers have unexpectedly higher age-related illnesses and early mortality rates, even after taking into account things like suicide and lifestyle habits,” said Owen Wolkowitz, co-senior author, Psychiatry at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) said in a statement. “It’s always been a mystery, and that’s what led us to signs of aging at the cellular level.”
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To find out, a group of researchers turned to so-called epigenetic clocks, which detect specific chemical changes in a person’s DNA to estimate their biological or cellular age. As someone gets older, certain atoms in their DNA are replaced by methyl groups (one carbon atom bound to three hydrogen atoms), in a natural process known as methylation. These chemical changes alter gene function in cells.
By detecting these chemical changes, scientists can also better understand whether a condition, such as depression, may be linked to the acceleration of cellular aging.
In the new study, the researchers looked for specific patterns of methylation previously linked to mortality, a measure known as ‘GrimAge’, using blood samples from 49 people with severe depression who were not treated with medication, and from 60 healthy controls of the same age. They have control over sex, current smoking status and body mass index. Although people with major depression did not have physical signs of accelerated aging, they had a larger GrimAge compared to their chronological age. In other words, they accelerated cellular aging by an average of two years compared to healthy controls.
“It shifts the way we understand depression, from a purely mental or psychiatric illness, which is limited to processes in the brain“to a body of a body,” said lead author Katerina Protsenko, a medical student at the UCSF, in the statement. It must fundamentally change the way we approach depression and how we think about it – as part of our overall health. “
But it is not yet clear whether depression causes changes in methylation in some people, or that depression and methylation are both related to another underlying factor in the body, according to the statement. For example, it is possible that some people may be exposed to specific methylation patterns when exposed to stressors. What’s more, the sample size was ‘modest’, and these findings need to be repeated in a larger and more diverse sample, the authors wrote.
Now the researchers hope to determine if treatments or therapy can prevent methylation changes that can accelerate cellular aging.
Originally published on Live Science.