Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder Linked to Faster Aging

Post-traumatic stress disorder may cause people to age faster, according to a newly released study by UC San Diego.

Researchers at UC San Diego’s School of Medicine and Veterans Affairs San Diego teamed up to look at the physical effects of PTSD, not just the known psychological ones.

“This is the first study of its type to link PTSD, a psychological disorder with no established genetic basis, which is caused by external, traumatic stress, with long-term, systemic effects on a basic biological process such as aging,” said the senior author of the study, Dilip V. Jeste, MD, in a statement.

Previous studies linked PTSD to psychiatric conditions like schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, so Jeste and his colleagues gathered those studies — dating back to 2000 — to see if there was evidence that a patient’s body was affected as well.

They identified biological markers that typically show early or accelerated senescence — or aging. Those markers were discovered in some suffering from PTSD.

The researchers say a number of studies showed a mild-to-moderate association between PTSD and earlier mortality, consistent with an early onset of aging.

“These findings do not speak to whether accelerated aging is specific to PTSD, but they do argue the need to re-conceptualize PTSD as something more than a mental illness,” said first author James B. Lohr, MD, professor of psychiatry, in a statement.

Lohr said the findings warrant a deeper look at the connection between PTSD and aging, which may lead to a change in how PTSD is treated

Another co-author, Barton Palmer, Ph.D., said more studies are needed to prove the link.

Funding for the study, in part, came from the U.S. Department of Defense, VA San Diego, National Institutes of Health and UC San Diego Center for Healthy Aging and Sam and Rose Stein Institute for Research on Aging.

For more on the science behind the findings, click here.

Contact Us