New science of aging: Heatwaves are making people age faster, study suggests

Researchers have found that repeated exposure to heatwaves is increasing aging in people.

The extreme temperatures are increasingly common due to the climate crisis, potentially causing long-lasting damage to the health of billions.

One expert believes that research represents a “paradigm shift”, radically changing the understanding of how severe heat's impacts on our health can be.

The research provides the first evaluation of the long-term impact of heatwaves, which were previously known to cause short-term increases in early deaths.

For instance, a heatwave in England was linked to 600 premature deaths in June last year.

For that purpose, researchers followed 25,000 people in Taiwan for 15 years and compared their exposure to heatwaves with their biological age.

The desired results showed that biological age increased by about nine days for people who experienced four more heatwaves' days after a two-year period.

However, manual workers who are spending more time outside, were strongly affected with their biological age increasing by 33 days.

The new research published in the journal Nature Climate Change used the desired results of various biological tests including inflammation, cholesterol, blood pressure and kidney function to examine the biological age of each person to see if their exposure to heatwaves was linked to ageing.

The results showed that the total number of heatwaves had a massive impact on accelerated aging.

While study further accounted for several factors like weight, exercise and smoking habits. 

Researchers noted that potentially relevant factors such as time spent outdoors, coolness of a person’s home and individual hair conditions meant for the future investigation to get a clearer picture of heat’s health impact.

Professor Paul Beggs at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia, said the results of the study were generally similar to those from a recent US study that showed outdoor heat accelerated aging among older adults.

From 2023, another US analysis found that, “high exposure to extreme heat was associated with faster cognitive decline for black people and residents of poor neighborhoods.”