With its sunny beaches and year-round warm weather, Florida has long been known as a popular place to retire.
But if you’re worried about speeding up the rate at which you get older, a new study may give you pause about choosing to live there in your twilight years.
Researchers found that extreme heat can accelerate biological aging in elderly people.
While your chronological age is the number of years you’ve been alive, your biological age reflects how well your body has aged based on genetics, lifestyle and overall health.
Research has shown that having a biological age that’s greater than your chronological age is strongly associated with a higher risk of disease and mortality.
And a 2023 study found that your biological age can actually be more accurate at determining your overall health than chronological age.
For this new study, researchers analyzed the data of more than 3,600 participants aged 56 and older across the US and compared their changes in biological age with their location’s heat index history and the number of extremely hot days over a six-year period.
What they found was that people who lived in areas that experienced more extreme heat — defined as temperatures above 90 degrees — showed greater increases in biological age.
The correlation remained even when controlling for other factors, such as lifestyle habits like smoking, alcohol consumption and fitness.
“Participants living in areas where heat days…occur half the year, such as Phoenix, Arizona, experienced up to 14 months of additional biological aging compared to those living in areas with fewer than 10 heat days per year,” co-author Eunyoung Choi, a postdoctoral scholar at the USC Leonard Davis School of Gerontology, said.
“Even after controlling for several factors, we found this association. Just because you live in an area with more heat days, you’re aging faster biologically.”
Jennifer Ailshire, a gerontology professor at USC and the study’s lead author, pointed out that extreme heat can be especially dangerous for people who are older.
The National Institute on Aging highlights that individuals aged 65 and older are more susceptible to heat-related illnesses due to factors such as existing health problems, age-related skin changes, and medications that affect the body’s ability to regulate temperature.
Additionally, the World Health Organization (WHO) warns that heat extremes can exacerbate chronic conditions such as cardiovascular and respiratory diseases.
Ailshire noted that the study took humidity into account, rather than just the temperature, and advised older adults to do so as well.
“It’s really about the combination of heat and humidity, particularly for older adults, because older adults don’t sweat the same way. We start to lose our ability to have the skin-cooling effect that comes from that evaporation of sweat,” she said.
“If you’re in a high humidity place, you don’t get as much of that cooling effect. You have to look at your area’s temperature and your humidity to really understand what your risk might be.”
The findings were published Wednesday in the journal Science Advances.
