Association between Physical Activity and Accelerated Aging Using S-Anthropoage: A Secondary Analysis of the Mexican...

Aging clocks estimate biological age (BA) using different measures. One novel way to measure it is to use AnthropoAge and S-AnthropoAge, which use sex-dependent body composition measures to predict 10 year all-cause mortality. Studies have found an association between physical activity and BA in different populations. Our objective was to determine the association between physical activity and BA using S-AnthropoAge in a Mexican population of older adults.

This is a secondary analysis of the Mexican Health and Aging Study. We implemented a simplified version of AnthropoAge (S-AnthropoAge), which is a metric designed to estimate BA based on anthropometric parameters, including body mass index (BMI) and waist-to-height ratio. We evaluated the association between accelerated aging and physical activity using adjusted linear regression models.

Those who exercised frequently had, on average, 0.449 fewer years of BA (approximately five months) than those who did not (95% CI: -0.661 to -0.231). The presence of comorbidities showed a gradient-effect relationship with BA, compared to self-reported illness. On average, those with two or more illnesses had higher accelerated aging of 0.542 years. Among the variables associated, being the caregiver for a child or children under 15 years old was also significantly associated with accelerated aging, compared to those who were not caregivers, after adjusting for other relevant variables CONCLUSIONS: Our study provides further evidence that regular physical activity influences the acceleration of BA, as captured by S-AnthropoAge. However, additional research is needed to fully understand the potential mediating effect of this association.