WHILE aging and stress are integral to life, constantly living in stress accelerates the process of aging, making people look and feel older than their age.
“All of us go through the aging process. In fact, science believes that aging starts since fertilization, and it does not start at 60 alone. It started since the first division of the product called ‘zygote,'” Dr. Eduardo Rommel Poblete, head of the Geriatric Center of the St. Luke’s Medical Center, said in a health forum organized by the Philippine College of Physicians (PCP) on Saturday.
The World Health Organization said that 1 billion people were 60 years or over in 2020, and that figure will rise to 1.4 billion by 2030, representing 1 in every 6 people globally.
It added that around 14 percent of adults ages 60 and over live with a mental disorder, based on the Global Health Estimates (GHE) in 2019.
Poblete said most people believe aging only starts at 60 because, at that age, they start to feel changes, and everything starts to slow down, adding that people at 60 or over walk at a slower pace and experience a change in their voice.
“We talk about aging in two ways. When we say aging, it can be chronological, which means the process starts the day a person is born. However, we also have this biological aging, or the aging in the organ systems,” he added.
Studies have determined that stress causes biological aging. A study published in the journal Cell Metabolism in May 2023 said exposure to stress can cause inflammation and damage DNA cells.
Poblete said people who maintain a healthy lifestyle could go through a slower aging process.
“In our discipline, our priority is not to cure [aging]. What we do is functional improvement. We are retaining the functional capacity of an aged person as we cannot reverse their diseases as most of them are not reversible. For example, we are trying to bring back their old habits like walking to the market,” Poblete said when asked if aging can be treated medically.
He warned that diseases commonly associated with older people, like osteoarthritis, Alzheimer’s disease and heart failure, could also afflict the young.
