(Photo: Westend61/Getty Images)
The more favorable socioeconomic factors in a person’s life — such as earning more money or having attained higher education levels — the less likely they are to have age-related diseases or show signs of biological aging, a study finds. The report was published on March 14 in Nature Medicine.
A team led by University College London (UCL) researchers found that social inequalities seem to directly affect the aging process. Specifically, people with more social advantages had fewer proteins in their blood that are linked to aging.
“This study provides strong biological evidence that social conditions influence the pace of aging. For decades, we’ve known that social advantage is linked to better health, but our findings suggest it may also slow down the ageing process itself,” Mika Kivimaki, PhD, lead author from the university, said in a statement.
The team evaluated four large, longitudinal studies that have tracked participants’ socioeconomic standing and outcomes for many years. In total, the studies include more than 800,000 participants.
The team looked at socioeconomic indicators like education; father’s socioeconomic position; and an adult’s neighborhood deprivation status, job and household income. The team also evaluated proteins in the blood linked to aging, as the protein counts can reflect multiple age-related processes that may be occurring before the onset of any diseases.
On average, there was a 20% higher risk of disease for people with low socioeconomic status relative to high socioeconomic status. The four groups studied used different measurements to evaluate outcomes. For example, 15 years after measuring a person’s status, those with low socioeconomic status had a similar number of age-related disease diagnoses as those in the high socioeconomic status group did after 20 years.
The risk for age-related diseases such as type 2 diabetes, liver disease, heart disease, lung cancer and stroke was more than twice as high in the most disadvantaged group compared to people with the highest socioeconomic standing.
Investigators estimated that up to 39% of the lower disease risk in socioeconomically advantaged people may be impacted by the 14 blood proteins studied.
Changes in social standing during life can shift a person’s trajectory. For example, those with poor early education who attained high social advantage later in life showed more favorable protein concentrations compared to those who stayed in low socioeconomic standing throughout their lives, the data revealed.