Turns out that helping others can also be a great way to help yourself.
If there is one thing that is guaranteed to get your Back Page correspondent grinding his teeth and muttering dark thoughts, it’s stories of obscenely wealthy tech titans pouring billions of dollars into schemes to prolong human life – usually their own.
Yes, we’re talking about you, Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page with your Calico Labs project, which boldly claims its objective is to “solve death”. Sorry, guys: organised religion has a prior claim in this territory.
It’s not that we begrudge them their phenomenal riches (well, maybe just a little bit); it’s the fact that there are so many more effective ways that such money could be spent to improve the health and longevity of our most vulnerable populations without the self-indulgence and ego tripping.
And for those of us without bank accounts the size of a well-run mid-sized nation, there’s still plenty of things we can do to prolong our lifespan that don’t require exorbitant expenditure.
Take volunteering, for instance.
According to a new study from the Brown School at Washington University in St Louis, doing good doesn’t just make you feel good, it can help you live longer as well.
Using data from the US’s national Health and Retirement Study, the researchers found that among retired folks especially, moderate volunteering was “significantly associated with decelerated epigenetic age acceleration”.
“We found that the effects of a moderate level of volunteering – between 50 to 199 hours per year, or about one to four hours per week – were strongest for retired people,” an associate professor at the Brown School, Cal Halvorsen, told media.
“It’s quite possible that the act of volunteering provided a sense of social and meaningful interaction, and physical activity, that those who were still working were already receiving. Those qualities have separately been linked to less rapid epigenetic age acceleration.”
For those who did more than 200 hours of volunteering, the health benefits were significant for both retirees and working individuals.
Of course, it is entirely possible that the type of person who does voluntary work is also the type of person who is healthier overall, so the researchers took steps to design the study to make the volunteer and non-volunteer groups fairly comparable in other characteristics.
“To better estimate the epigenetic age effects, we included self-reported health and the number of depressive symptoms in the weighting scheme,” Professor Halvorsen said.
“In our final models, we also controlled for other health variables that are strongly associated with epigenetic aging, including frequency of physical activity, smoking status, binge drinking, obesity and more.”
Which lead our boffins to confidently conclude that volunteering could potentially be considered as a public health intervention to enhance health and quality of life among older adults.
As non-drug-based interventions go, this certainly has win-win stamped all over it. And there’s not a single narcissistic Silicon Valley billionaire required to make it work.
Volunteer your life-prolonging story tips to penny@medicalrepublic.com.au.
