Consequences of Heterogeneity in Aging: Parental Age at Death Predicts Midlife All-Cause Mortality and Hospitalization in a Swedish National Birth Cohort

Abstract

BackgroundThe processes that underlie aging may advance at different rates in different individuals and an advanced biological age, relative to the chronological age, is associated with increased risk of disease and death. Here we set out to quantify the extent to which heterogeneous aging shapes health outcomes in midlife by following a Swedish birth-cohort and using parental age at death as a proxy for biological age in the offspring.MethodsWe followed a nationwide Swedish birth cohort (N= 89 688) between the ages of 39 to 66 with respect to hospitalizations and death. Cox regressions were used to estimate the association, in the offspring, between parental age at death and all-cause mortality, as well as hospitalization for conditions belonging to one of 10 different ICD-10 chapters.ResultsLonger parental lifespan was consistently associated with reduced risks of hospitalization and all-cause mortality. Differences in risk were mostly evident before the age of 50. Each additional decade of parental survival decreased the risk of offspring all-cause mortality by 22% and risks of hospitalizations by 9 to 20 percent across the ten diseases categories considered. The number of deaths and hospitalizations attributable to having parents not living until old age were 1500 (22%) and 11000 (11%) respectively.ConclusionsOur findings highlight that increased parental lifespan is consistently associated with health benefits in the offspring across multiple outcomes and suggests that heterogeneous aging processes have clinical implications already in midlife.