Accelerating research on biological aging and mental health: Current challenges and future directions

• Published in: Psychoneuroendocrinology 2019-08, Vol.106, p.293-311
• Main Authors: Han, Laura K.M., Verhoeven, Josine E., Tyrka, Audrey R., Penninx, Brenda W.J.H., Wolkowitz, Owen M., Månsson, Kristoffer N.T., Lindqvist, Daniel, Boks, Marco P., Révész, Dóra, Mellon, Synthia H., Picard, Martin
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Aging - physiology; Biological age; Brain; Clinical Medicine; DNA methylation; Humans; Klinisk medicin; Medical and Health Sciences; Medicin och hälsovetenskap; Mental Disorders - metabolism; Mental Disorders - physiopathology; Mental Health; Mitochondria; Neurologi; Neurology; Psychology; Psychopathology; psykologi; Stress, Psychological - physiopathology; Stress, Psychological - psychology; Telomere length
• ISSN: 0306-4530; 1873-3360; 1873-3360
• DOI: 10.1016/j.psyneuen.2019.04.004

[Display omitted] •Stress and mental illness are prospectively associated with biological aging.•Technical limitations can compromise the interpretation of biological age indicators.•Integrating biological age indicators into composite indices improves their usefulness.•Human psychobiology is an opportunity to elucidate basic aging processes.•We highlight key challenges and suggest recommendations to overcome them. Aging is associated with complex biological changes that can be accelerated, slowed, or even temporarily reversed by biological and non-biological factors. This article focuses on the link between biological aging, psychological stressors, and mental illness. Rather than comprehensively reviewing this rapidly expanding field, we highlight challenges in this area of research and propose potential strategies to accelerate progress in this field. This effort requires the interaction of scientists across disciplines - including biology, psychiatry, psychology, and epidemiology; and across levels of analysis that emphasize different outcome measures - functional capacity, physiological, cellular, and molecular. Dialogues across disciplines and levels of analysis naturally lead to new opportunities for discovery but also to stimulating challenges. Some important challenges consist of 1) establishing the best objective and predictive biological age indicators or combinations of indicators, 2) identifying the basis for inter-individual differences in the rate of biological aging, and 3) examining to what extent interventions can delay, halt or temporarily reverse aging trajectories. Discovering how psychological states influence biological aging, and vice versa, has the potential to create novel and exciting opportunities for healthcare and possibly yield insights into the fundamental mechanisms that drive human aging.