‘Difficult People’ Could Be Ageing You – Unless You Married Them

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Are you in the unfortunate position of dreading Christmas gatherings because of the people who will be around the table? Do you feel like you are growing grey hairs every time you have to deal with that one person at work? Well there’s some bad news – negative social relationships like these might actually be contributing to more rapid ageing. That’s what this study on ‘hasslers’ appears to suggest, though with some important caveats.

Social Ties, Ageing, and You

It is very challenging to prove that a given lifestyle factor has a causal effect on ageing in humans, partly because our lives are complex and full of interconnected environmental exposures that influence each other, and partly because ‘ageing’ cannot truly be measured (something we’ll touch on later). However, studies do repeatedly show that more social integration is associated with longer lifespan, in the region of 10% longer life compared to socially isolated individuals. There are confounding factors to be considered here – for example, less healthy individuals and those with cognitive decline may be less able to engage in social activities. However, having a social support network is likely to have mental health benefits such as stress relief, improved resilience in the face of adverse life events, and improved survival in the case of health emergencies (that is to say, someone’s going to find you on the floor and call an ambulance!)

Yet one factor that is rarely considered is that not all social relationships are good. If positive social ties can slow ageing, might negative social ties have the opposite effect? That’s what the aforementioned study set out to investigate.

What The Researchers Did

To investigate this theory, researchers looked at data from 2,685 participants in the Person-to-Person Health Interview Study in Indiana, USA. Participants gave details of their positive and negative social relationships, with ‘hasslers’ being identified in the study as those who were reported to ‘often’ cause problems and make life difficult for the respondent.

They then estimated participants’ biological age – that is to say, the extent to which ageing appears to have progressed in their cells and tissues, as opposed to the number of years since birth (chronological age). To do this, they used two epigenetic clocks. Theses are machine learning algorithms which use DNA methylation (the addition molecular ‘tags’ called methyl groups to the DNA molecule) in order to estimate whether someone is ageing faster or more slowly than average. Methylation occurs at certain sites within the DNA in a predictable way throughout life. If someone has DNA methylation patterns that resemble those of the average 50 year-old, but they were born 45 years ago, this suggests that they have an epigenetic age acceleration of 5 years (they are biologically 5 years older than they ‘should’ be).

Hasslers Aren’t Rare Or Random

Before getting into the findings concerning ageing, researchers found that so-called hasslers were pretty common, with nearly 30% of participants reporting at least one hassler in their network and 10% reporting 2 or more. Women and unemployed people were significantly more likely to report having hasslers than other respondents, as were people with larger social networks. Higher hassler counts were also associated with worse self-reported health and social vulnerabilities (people who reported difficult childhoods and people who felt others depended on them reported more hasslers, for example).

Hasslers Are Associated With Faster Epigenetic Ageing – Unless You Marry Them

According to the epigenetic clocks, participants had a 1.5% faster pace of epigenetic ageing per hassler relative to people who had no hasslers. That means that if you have one hassler, then after 10 years, you will have undergone 1.8 months of additional epigenetic ageing compared to having had no hasslers. Furthermore, participants’ epigenetic age at the time of measurement was on average 9 months greater per additional hassler compared to a participant with no hasslers.

When researchers analysed the nature of hassler relationships and compared them to the degree of epigenetic age acceleration, they found that hasslers who were members of the respondent’s family had a greater impact on epigenetic age when compared to non-kin hasslers. There was one notable exception to this, however. Despite 8.5% of spouses being reported as hasslers, there was no significant relationship between spouse hasslers and either epigenetic age acceleration or epigenetic age at time of measurement.

In addition to epigenetic age, hasslers were also associated with worse self-reported health, particularly mental health but also body mass index (BMI) and waist-to-hip ratio (a measure of central obesity and visceral fat).

What This Study Means (And What It Doesn’t)

So, should you marry your difficult colleague and cut off your insufferable cousin to age more slowly? Well, it’s not so simple – this study is observational in nature, and so cannot prove that hasslers actually cause accelerated epigenetic ageing. It is possible that the types of people with more hasslers in their lives are simply more stressed and less healthy for other reasons, or that the conditions that force them to interact with the hasslers on a more regular basis (such as being dependent on said hasslers or being stuck in a dead-end job with them) represent the real cause of accelerated epigenetic ageing.

As for the marriage observation, it seems unlikely that bad marriages would have less of an impact on epigenetic age than other negative social ties. This result is more likely to represent the fact that people get to choose their spouse, meaning that relationships with hassler spouses are more likely to remain beneficial overall. In other words, if the respondent considers their spouse a hassler but still chose to marry them (or has not divorced them yet!), it could be because the spouse has other qualities that outweigh the hassler downside, or that the respondent is resistant to hassler-induced stress in general.

The final caveat that needs to be highlighted is that the epigenetic clocks are not strictly measuring biological age – they are measuring epigenetic changes, which constitute one aspect of ageing that correlates with chronological age at the population level. To give an analogy, wrinkles correlate with chronological age, so you could measure the number of wrinkles on a person’s skin and produce an estimate of how hold they are by comparing them to the population average. However, if someone has wrinkles equivalent to the average 50 year-old, this doesn’t necessarily mean that they have a biological or chronological age of 50, because ageing isn’t the only factor contributing to wrinkles, and 50 year-old skin doesn’t necessarily mean a 50 year-old heart. Similarly, though epigenetic changes are thought to contribute to ageing, they are not the only contributor, and can also be influenced by factors that have nothing to do with ageing. Furthermore, epigenetic age is usually measured from white blood cells and may be different in other cell types, as different tissues age at different rates. Therefore, we cannot say with absolute certainty that 9 months of epigenetic ageing per hassler means that hasslers advance biological ageing by 9 months. Epigenetic age is simply the best method we have found so far of approximating biological age.