A new study conducted by National University of Singapore (NUS) researchers reveals that impatience in young women is connected to faster aging than their more patient counterparts, a connection that has been linked to shorter leukocyte telomeres. The study is the first to link impatience to a molecular marker of cellular aging in humans.
The team examined the long-term health effects of patience in a group of 1,158 young, healthy undergraduates at NUS. First, the team used a behavioral economic game in order to determine the level of impatience for each participant by seeing if they chose immediate payoff rather than receiving a bigger reward at a later time.
Afterwards, the team examined each patient's telomere length in the laboratory in order to make connections to their level of impatience; telomeres are the caps at the end of DNA strands that protect chromosomes and a decrease in length occurs each time a cell divides and ages.
The results showed that females who were identified as impatient in the initial behavioral economic game had shorter telomere lengths, which indicates that they are aging at an accelerated rate at the cellular level.
"Our team is among the pioneers in leveraging the natural synergy between behavioral economics and molecular genetics to seek a deeper understanding of how people make decisions. The present paper illustrates the promise of this approach in delivering a fresh understanding linking impatience elicited from observable choice behavior with telomere length underpinning ageing at the molecular level," Chew Soo Hong, who helped lead the study, said in a press release.
The next step for the research team is to examine whether older, aging individuals possess longer telomeres and if they possess behavioral traits of patience.
The findings were published in the Feb. 22 issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
