You look marvelous! And you'll live longer, too!

William Atkins
Tuesday, 15 December 2009 19:50

Science - Biology

According to a study in the British Medical Journal, if you look younger than your real age, you have a better chance of living longer than someone, of the same age, who looks older than the hills.


The researchers of the study published their conclusions in the December issue of the British Medical Journal under the title “Perceived age as clinically useful biomarker of ageing: cohort study.”

The researchers wanted to find out if the perceived age of an individual (that is, what they look like to other people—do they look older or younger than their actual age) is important to overall mortality of the individual.

They used a population based twin cohort study from Denmark (called the Longitudinal Study of Aging Danish Twins, from 1995 to 2005) in which 387 Danish twins (774 total number) were used as the subjects.

The subjects were evaluated (assessed) with facial photographs by twenty geriatric nurses, ten young men who were student teachers (from the age of 22 to 37 years), and eleven elderly women between the ages of 70 and 87 years.

The assessors rated the perceived age of the twins by looking at pictures of the subjects’ faces.

And, they were unaware of the age of the twins. Each twin was evaluated on different days by the assessors.

The authors of this study are: Kaare Christensen, Mikael Thinggaard, Matt McGue, Helle Rexbye, and Jacob v B Hjelmborg (all from the Danish Twin Registry and Danish Aging Research Center, Institute of Public Health, University of Southern Denmark; Abraham Aviv (Center of Human Development and Aging, University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey, New Jersey, U.S.A.); David Gunn and Frans van der Ouderaa (Unilever Discover, Colworth House, Sharnbrook, Bedfordshire, U.K.); and James W Vaupel (Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, Rostock, Germany).

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