7 days ago
A New Study Says You Can Delay Death—but Not the Speed of Aging
Here's what you'll learn when you read this story:
With incredible changes in our species' lifespan over the past century, some aging experts have pondered whether the biology of aging—or senescence—is changing.
To explore this question, a new study re-examines a popular theory that the rate of aging hasn't changed—it's just been delayed by about a decade.
By analyzing mortality data from Italy, Denmark, France, and Sweden, and refining it to reflect age-related deaths, the researchers show that any deviation among populations is likely a symptom of 'historical shocks' rather than biological changes.
To say that 'anti-aging' is an obsession in the U.S. would be a bit of an understatement. In 2024, for example, experts valued the anti-aging industry at around $52 billion, with every expectation for it to grow beyond $100 billion by the end of the decade. The promise of these products to stop—or, at the very least, curtail—aging's most deleterious effects is a convincing one. After all, haven't we proven over the past decade that improved habits and living conditions can shoot a population's life expectancy into the atmosphere?
However, this picture is much more complicated for scientists studying aging, which is also known as 'senescence.' It can be argued that life expectancy—mostly due to improved nutrition and medical advancements (especially the lowering of the infant mortality rate)—has improved across generations, and it's now expected that the centenarian population in the U.S. will quadruple over the next 30 years. But one question in decades of research in human aging remains unanswered: Could the rate of human senescence somehow be changing across generations?
It's a question that's been pondered for quite some time. The foundations of this mortality-related research date back to the early 19th century, when mathematician Benjamin Gompertz first devised mortality rates. His work showed that, initially, rates started very low, but increased the same percentage year after year. However, the rates continue to grow as we age, sort of like compounding interest in a 401(k). It starts off slow and first, but then it really takes off.
In a new study uploaded to the preprint server aXiv by Silvio Patricio, a research assistant at the Interdisciplinary Centre on Population Dynamics at the University of Southern Denmark analyzed this question by revisiting a theory first postulated by James W. Vaupel in 2010. In his study, Vaupel discovered that the rate of human senescence—the one largely calculated by Gompertz in 1825— hadn't changed among generations, but that the process of aging had been delayed by a decade. Vaupel built this hypothesis from a variety of research dating back to 1994, and found that the slope of mortality largely remained unaltered. However, other studies challenged this theory by finding small-but-persistent variations among aging rates.
'These patterns raise a deeper question: are we seeing real biological change in how humans age—or are we seeing something else?,' Patricio wrote. 'One possibility is that what looks like a change in [the rate of aging] is not biological at all, but historical. Period events—such as World War I, the 1918 flu, or World War II—affect many cohorts at once, just at different ages […]. If such events have lasting consequences, they could subtly distort cohort-level mortality patterns.'
Patricio sets out to settle the matter once and for all. Using a mixture model, the researcher separated senescent mortality (that is, age-related deaths) from general cohort mortality data from France, Denmark, Italy, and Sweden (he also refined the data to lessen the influence of early-life mortality). After developing cohort-specific estimates of the Gompertz slope, Patricio found that aging wasn't perfectly constant across cohorts, and that this was likely due to a drift caused by population shocks that cohorts carry as 'echoes' of these past events—even if they occurred outside their own lifespan.
'Once we filter out non-senescent mortality and account for the accumulation of shared period effects, [the rate of aging] becomes strikingly consistent,' Patricio wrote. 'There is no meaningful trend, and no evidence that the biology of aging is shifting across cohorts. The variation that remains is not biological drift, but the footprint of history—the cumulative result of shocks experienced in calendar time.'
So, if the rate of aging is truly immutable, is the anti-aging industry basically one big snake oil salesman? Well, yes and no. While the rate of aging is remarkably constant across generations and populations, eating well, exercising, and getting enough sleep will still do wonders for your longevity and make sure that the compounding interest of your mortality doesn't catch up with you prematurely.
The rate at which we gray may be an immutable fact of our biology, but that doesn't mean we can't do so with some measure of grace.
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