How Extreme Heat Can Speed Up Aging

JAMIE CHUNG/TRUNK ARCHIVE Facebook Twitter LinkedIn

Extreme heat can do more than make you sweat. According to a new study, it can make you age faster too.

The study, published recently in the journal Science Advances, shows that ongoing exposure to heat over 80 degrees accelerates biological aging, which is how your body ages on the inside at

the cellular level, regardless of how many birthdays you’ve had.  

This might mean, for example, that instead of getting a specific health condition at a certain older age, it happens earlier, says Deborah Carr, director of the Center of Innovation in

Social Science at Boston University, who studies heat and aging.

“[It] means you [have] more years of suffering, more years of demands on your caregiver,” Carr explains. It also means you may not have Medicare in place to properly care for any premature

health problems that arise, she notes. 

If you’re living in an area with extreme heat for half the year, you could be even more prone to faster aging, the study found. In fact, for people living in hot climates, biological aging

sped up nearly three years in some cases.

For the study, a team of researchers at the Leonard Davis School of Gerontology at the University of Southern California used different biological clock models to measure markers of aging in

blood samples from 3,686 American adults, ages 56 and older. The researchers then compared each individual’s aging outcomes, measured by slight changes in their DNA, with their geographical

heat index, considering heat and humidity.

Researchers categorized hot days as those that were 80 to 90 degrees, 90 to 103 degrees, and 103 to 124 degrees. They found that people who lived in areas that experienced more days of

extreme heat were more likely to see greater increases in their biological age compared with people who experienced fewer hot days.

“Participants living in areas where heat days, as defined as Extreme Caution or higher levels [90 degrees and up], occur half the year, such as Phoenix, Arizona, experienced up to 14 months

of additional biological aging compared to those living in areas with fewer than 10 heat days per year,” study coauthor Eunyoung Choi said in a statement. “Even after controlling for several

factors, we found this association. Just because you live in an area with more heat days, you’re aging faster biologically.”