Social media is awash with health tips, workout gurus, dieting advice and health hacks that cynics might dismiss as a vortex of clickbait, wishful thinking, Peter Pan syndrome and possible scams.
But, even as people are convinced they are better informed about health than previous generations, doctors are warning those under the age of 55 that they are more vulnerable than they think to diseases typically associated with the physical decline that comes with ageing.
Not only that, but middle-aged and younger people nowadays are more vulnerable than allegedly less-healthy older age groups and predecessors.
According to Washington University, United States, researchers, today’s younger generations are “ageing faster biologically than their older counterparts.”
“The larger the gap between biological age – that is, how old our bodies appear to be – and chronological age – which is how many years we have actually lived –the higher the cancer risk,” the University of Washington says in a press release launching the research, which was published in the journal Nature.
“People in more recent birth cohorts had larger age gaps than those in older birth cohorts, which may help explain the rise in early-onset cancer in recent generations,” the university warns.
Its researchers reported “links between faster ageing in particular organ systems and increased risks for certain cancers.”
“An immune system that appears older than its actual age was associated with early-onset lung cancer,” the scientists say.
They warn there appears to be a similar link between prematurely old fat tissue and the growing problem of early-onset colorectal cancer.
The Washington team’s findings followed a recent warning by the Mayo Clinic that hypertension or high blood pressure – long considered a condition seen mostly in older people or those who are overweight with diabetes – “can happen at any age.”
“Prevalence in people in early to mid-adulthood has been rising globally,” the clinic says.
The medics caution that hypertension can pass undetected among ostensibly healthy younger people with a genetic predisposition to the disease.
“Untreated, high blood pressure raises the risk of heart attack, heart failure, stroke and other serious health problems, including kidney and eye problems, dementia, and metabolic syndrome,” according to the clinic’s doctors.
More generally, in 2024, researchers at the University of Edinburgh, United Kingdom, and the Max Planck Institute, Germany, explained that generation by generation, spontaneous mutations to genes “introduce heritable changes that tend to reduce fitness in populations of highly adapted living organisms.” – dpa
