THOUGH many of us think of ageing as a gradual, cumulative process, scientists have discovered that the process speeds up at two specific times in peoples’ life.
For women specifically, this acceleration is related to the experience of childbirth and menopause.
Lead by Weiqi Zhang, a team of researchers at the Beijing Institute of Genomics in China said the pace of ageing tends to speed up for women in their 30s and 50s, which is when they’re most likely to experience those two life-altering events.
The research team from recruited 113 women aged 20 to 66 who had no known medical conditions and were from Quzhou in south-east China.
They collected samples of the participants’ blood, urine and faeces, asked them about their diet and lifestyle, photographed their faces and took more than 100 clinical measurements, including their height and weight, blood pressure and lung capacity.
Next, they analysed their genes, facial dimensions, gut microbiomes, hormones and immune markers, while also measuring the length of their telomeres – pieces of DNA that protect the ends of chromosomes.
Scientists were able to determine that women tended to be biologically ‘younger’ than their actual age if they ate healthy diets that included plenty of fruits and grains.
They also observed that those aged around 30 and 50 showed the fastest rates of ageing.
This lead Dr Zhang to conclude that ageing is tied to hormonal changes.
Women of those ages often give birth or go through the menopause, she explained, two processes which radically affect their hormones.
“These results indicate that the pace of female ageing might be, at least partially, regulated by the hormone regulation system,” Dr Zhang stated in the study that was published in the journal Med.
Volunteers older than 45 who were also taking hormone replacement therapy (HRT) to treat menopause symptoms also seemed to age at a slower rate than those who didn’t.
“Hormone replacement therapy can alleviate the decline in circulating hormones, potentially slowing the rate of [ageing],” according to Dr Zhang.
The researcher concluded that further research was needed to confirm the study’s findings, as it included only a small number of participants.
The team plans to also carry out a similar study in men to find out if they display different patterns of ageing.