While chronological age (the number of years since birth) is easy to measure, it tells us very little about an individual’s true physiological condition. In contrast to chronological age (years of age since birth), biological age represents an individual’s functional “age” at the cellular level. In other words, at 65 years of age, you are aging slowly if your biological age is only 50, whereas a biological age of 70 indicates that you are aging more rapidly. Additionally, the individual with a younger biological age is likely to have a greater healthspan (number of years free from disease and disability), even if these two individuals live the same length of time.
The preferred method of assessing biological age involves epigenetic clocks that are based on predictable, age-dependent changes to DNA methylation (DNAm), chemical tags on DNA that influence gene activity without altering the underlying code. These predictable changes are referred to as DNAmAge. Numerous environmental, behavioral, and genetic factors can elicit changes to DNAm that occur at a slower or faster rate than predicted for chronological age. An “acceleration of DNAmAge progression” occurs when DNAm profiles change faster than predicted and is associated with adverse health outcomes that can shorten both healthspan and longevity.
Among the most potent and pervasive drivers of biological age acceleration is stress. In this review, we will detail a 2023 article published in Cell Metabolism describing the transient impact of three types of stress – surgical trauma, pregnancy, and severe infectious disease – on the acceleration of DNAmAge. A common theme of these studies is that the biological aging process is rapidly accelerated in response to stress but is reversible once the stressor has subsided.
Results from this study demonstrate how stress-induced changes to biological age contribute to the aging process over the total lifespan and highlight the importance of stress-mitigating strategies to help increase your resiliency at the cellular level. In this article, we will discuss how stress gets under our skin and impacts the biological aging process. In addition, we will detail emerging pharmacological and behavioral strategies to increase stress resiliency with the aim of arming you with methods to slow, and potentially reverse your biological age.