Study: People who feel younger than age live longer

When it comes to longevity, feeling young may be more important than being young.

So say a pair of researchers from University College London and the International Longevity Centre-UK. They analyzed data on nearly 6,500 English adults and found that those who felt at least one year older than their actual age were 41 percent more likely to die within eight years than were those who felt at least three years younger than the age listed on their birth certificates.

The finding was published Monday by JAMA Internal Medicine.

The data for the study came from the English Longitudinal Study of Ageing. A total of 6,489 people who were at least 52 years old joined the study in 2004 or 2005 and were then tracked for an average of 99 months.

When they enrolled in the study, volunteers were asked this simple question: “How old do you feel you are?” Although the average actual age of the volunteers was 65.8 years old, their average self-perceived age was significantly lower – only 56.8 years old.

The feeling that one’s true age is lower than one’s chronological age was widespread in the study sample. Fully 69.6 percent of the volunteers felt at least three years younger, while only 4.8 percent felt more than one year older. The remaining 25.6 percent felt “about their actual age,” the researchers wrote.

A total of 1,266 of the volunteers died during the course of the study, but those deaths weren’t evenly distributed among all three groups. The mortality rate among those who felt older than their true age was 24.6 percent, compared with 18.5 percent for those who felt their age and only 14.3 percent for those who felt much younger.

It’s possible that some of this difference could be explained by people who were already quite ill when they joined the study and thus felt older than their actual age. So the researchers excluded all the people who died within one year of enrolling and ran the numbers again. The results held up.

The researchers also adjusted the data to take into account various factors that might account for the link between feeling older and the heightened risk of near-term death. The pair used statistical methods to control for health problems such as heart disease, diabetes, cancer, arthritis and depression. They controlled for behavioral factors such as smoking, drinking and spending time engaged in social activities. And they factored in demographic variables such as gender, ethnicity, education and wealth.

With all of these things taken into consideration, they still found that the risk of death during the course of the study was 41 percent higher for the people who felt older than for the people who felt younger.