Early wrinkles no sign of an early grave
Premature ageing, early wrinkles, premature balding and grey hairs can be distressing, but looking older than you really are doesn’t necessarily signal an early death, found a new study.
Canadian researchers have found you need to look at least 10 years more mature than your true age before your appearance is a sign of ailing health.
The finding raises questions about the long-standing practice among doctors to consider how old their patients look as part of routine physical exams.
“This has been passed on from generation to generation of physicians without any explicit explanation of exactly why we are doing it,” says lead researcher Dr Stephen Hwang, a physician and researcher at St. Michael’s Hospital in Toronto and at the University of Toronto.
“It’s implied by doing this that you are getting a sense of a person’s overall level of health,” he says.
“It’s interesting to think that it’s probably not a really strong indicator of whether someone is healthy or not.”
To find out how useful the practice may or may not be, Dr Hwang and colleagues surveyed people who were waiting in clinics to see their doctors.
Overall, results showed that discrepancies between a physician’s assessment and a patient’s age didn’t mean much until the doctor’s judgment was at least 10 years older than the patient’s true age.
Among those patients, Hwang and colleagues reported in the Journal of General Internal Medicine, 99% had real health problems.
“The bottom line is that looking slightly older than one’s actual age is not necessarily an ominous health sign,” says Dr Hwang.
On the other hand, the researchers identified quite a few health issues in people with an age-appropriate appearance. So even if you look youthful, you are not necessarily problem-free.
Nevertheless, he says, observation will always be a powerful tool for doctors as they evaluate the health of their patients. Assessing age is just one form of looking closely at how someone is doing.
