Social hallmarks of aging: Suggestions for geroscience research

This paper focuses on the social hallmarks of aging including low lifetime socioeconomic status, adversity in childhood and adulthood, being a member of a minority group, adverse health behaviors, and adverse psychological states. The "Social Hallmarks of Aging" are analogous to the "Geroscience Hallmarks of Aging" in reflecting a set of underlying and interrelated social causes of multiple age-related health outcomes. The paper presents empirical work incorporating the social hallmarks of aging with indicators of multiple biological hallmarks of aging as well as downstream biology in explaining a range of health outcomes. Results show the relative strength of the associations of social and biological measures with important health outcomes. Social factors are strongly related to physical and cognitive functioning and multimorbidity in this older population; this remains true when the significant number of biological measures are controlled. These results can be interpreted to mean that a significant amount of the social variance in age-related health outcomes is not explained by these measures of biology. Indicators of the geroscience hallmarks of aging only relate modestly to the variability in human health outcomes. Attention to the social hallmarks related to human aging can usefully be incorporated into work on the biological hallmarks of aging to make greater progress in understanding human aging.