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. 2019 May 1;76(5):461-462.
doi: 10.1001/jamapsychiatry.2019.0037.

Psychiatry's Opportunity to Prevent the Rising Burden of Age-Related Disease

Terrie E Moffitt  1   2 , Avshalom Caspi  1   2
Affiliations

Psychiatry's Opportunity to Prevent the Rising Burden of Age-Related Disease

Terrie E Moffitt et al. JAMA Psychiatry. .
No abstract available

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Conflict of interest statement

Conflict of Interest Disclosures: Both authors have completed and submitted the ICMJE Form for Disclosure of Potential Conflicts of Interest. The authors report no financial relationships with commercial interests.

Figures

Figure 1.
Figure 1.. Psychiatry’s Opportunity to Prevent Age-related Disease.
Panel A is a stylized depiction of historical shifts in the distribution of age groups in the population. Age bands sum to 100%. First, compare the chart from the past to the chart for the future, to view the historical shift in the support ratio of young workers versus dependent elders. When the population forms a pyramid, as it did 40 years ago, many young workers support elders. When the population ages, as it will 40 years from now, fewer young workers will support elders (source: https://www.populationpyramid.net). Second, we overlaid the charts with colors to show stylized depictions of age-of-onset and prevalence of mental disorders (orange), non-infectious physical diseases (aqua), and neurodegenerative conditions (blue). Young people who experience mental disorder tend to develop non-infectious and neurodegenerative diseases as they age. Panel B shows that individuals in the Dunedin Longitudinal Study who experience more psychopathology tend to age faster. The p factor operationalizes the theory of liability to experience any and all mental disorders over the life-course. We measured p as a latent factor summarizing the common variance among all of the multiple psychiatric symptoms ever experienced by Dunedin cohort members between ages 18–38 years. The measure p is standardized to a mean of 100 (SD=15), and higher p scores indicate more psychopathology. Histogram bars show the percentages of the sample (right vertical-axis) at different levels of the p factor, which is normally distributed as a bell curve. The Pace of Aging operationalizes the coordinated progressive loss of integrity across bodily systems that is the aging process according to geroscience theory. We measured the pace of biological aging from changes in 18 biomarkers of Dunedin cohort members’ cardiovascular, metabolic, endocrine, pulmonary, hepatic, renal, immune, and periodontal systems. These 18 biomarkers were measured when cohort members were aged 26, 32, and 38 years. The Pace of Aging quantifies Study members’ rate of biological aging in year-units of physiological decline per chronological year. The squares and standard error bars show the Pace of Aging (left vertical-axis) of individuals as a function of their p scores < 75, 75–85, 85–95, 95–105, 105–115, 115–125, 125–135, and >135. The straight regression line shows the correlation between the p-factor and accelerated Pace of Aging, r=.21, p<.01, calculated on the full distribution of scores in the cohort.
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References

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