Emotional instability is associated with premature aging

The study can contribute to a better understanding of how health care can meet the needs of this vulnerable group. People with psychiatric diagnoses also experience poor health has been known for a long time, but now we are getting more precise knowledge to understand the degree of health loss, says Jussi Jokinen, a professor of psychiatry at Umeå University and the researcher behind the study.

more accurate knowledge

In the study, researchers investigated what is called epigenetic aging in a group of women who were diagnosed in psychiatry with a diagnosis of Emotionally Unstable Personality Syndrome and Suicidal Behavior. These were compared with a control group of healthy women.

Women with a current diagnosis had, on average, a biological age that was six years higher than their actual chronological age. The difference was greatest for women with the diagnosis who also used tobacco. There, the biological age was almost eleven years higher than the actual one.

The score shows the need for interventions to reduce tobacco use and thus provides specific information about possible interventions to improve health outcomes in this group of patients. More research is needed at the same time to be able to follow up on links between mental and physical ill health, says Adrian Desai-Bostrom, a postdoctoral researcher at Umea University and first author of the study.

Epigenetic age depends on the biological age of an individual that is estimated by measurements of changes in the activation pattern of a person’s genome, that is, the genetic material. Several so-called epigenetic clocks have been developed with the goal of enabling the measurement of the biological age of individuals by examining the activity of genes at different locations in the genome relevant to health outcomes. The study uses the epigenetic clock GrimAge, which in previous studies has been shown to be accurate in predicting life expectancy or the time until people have cancer or cardiovascular disease.

The study is based on examinations of 97 women in the Stockholm region with a diagnosis of emotionally unstable personality syndrome and suicidal behavior, as well as a control group of 32 healthy women. Because the study cohort only included women, it’s unclear to what extent the findings hold for men as well. The study shows the relationship between diagnosis and biological age, but does not provide answers to the direct cause of premature aging. The study included women only because the original project with the Emotionally Unstable group consisted of women only, with a diagnosis of EAS more common than among men.

The study was published in the scientific journal Translational Psychiatry.