Image by Image via Pixabay / Victor Tangermann
This may be the harbinger of numerous industries, but it seems that millennials are not getting too hot themselves.
At the very least, according to a team of sociologists at Ohio State University who have discovered a disturbing trend: Generations X and Y – the second group commonly known as millennials – are aging really badly. According to their research, conducted Thursday in the American Journal of Epidemiologya downward trend of physiological, psychological and behavioral problems in baby boomers started through gene X and especially millennials.
“The deteriorating health profiles we have found in gene X and gene Y are alarming,” Hui Zheng, chief researcher and professor of sociology in Ohio, said in a press release.
“If we do not find a way to slow this trend, we may see the spread of disease and mortality rates in the United States as these generations age,” he added.
In particular, Zheng and graduate student Paola Echave examined data from two giant surveys of nearly 700,000 people conducted by the National Center for Health Statistics to see how people’s health changes over time and across generations.
It is not just rising obesity rates that are explaining the deteriorating health, but the study does suggest that it appears to be contributing to some factors used to determine overall health. Other factors such as depression, increasing sedentary lifestyles and increasing drug and alcohol use also contributed.
“One possibility is that people in older generations quit smoking in larger numbers while younger generations are more likely to start smoking,” Zheng said in the release. “But we need to investigate further to see if that is correct.”
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