Looking Older Than Actual Age Not Necessarily Sign of Poor Health
November 18, 2010
Looking older than your age may be upsetting, but it isn't necessarily a sign you're in bad health, researchers say.

A study out of Canada has found that people who look less than 10 years older than they really are do not necessarily have other conditions causing the discrepancy, while those who look at least a decade older than they are probably are in severely poor mental or physical health.

"The impression that someone looks older than their actual age is not a reliable way of determining if someone is in poor health unless it's a fairly extreme discrepancy -- 10 or more years older," lead author Stephen Hwang told AOL Health.

The impetus for the project was the fact that many U.S. and Canadian medical students are taught to use how old a person looks as a measure of whether they're healthy, according to Hwang.

"Every single physician has been taught to do this. ... It is subjective," said Hwang, a specialist in internal medicine at St. Michael's Hospital at the University of Toronto. "One of the things that our study did show was that there's not a lot of agreement among physicians, which is another reason to question the practice."

Hwang and his team looked at 126 patients ages 30 to 70 who were visiting a doctor's office, asking them to fill out a questionnaire about whether or not they were in bad physical or mental health. Each person was photographed, and their pictures were shown to 58 doctors who were asked to rate how old they were and told their actual ages.

The findings showed that 99 percent of those who looked 10 or more years older than they were were in severely poor mental or physical health. But assessing that a person looked up to five years older than their actual age had little effect in determining how sick or well that patient was.

"Few people are aware that when physicians describe their patients to other physicians, they often include an assessment of whether the patient looks older than his or her actual age," Hwang said in a statement.

Hwang said the findings debunk a tool many doctors typically find valuable in outlining a patient's overall health.

"Physicians have simply assumed that their quick assessment of how old a person looks has diagnostic value," he said. "We were really surprised to find that people have to look a decade older than their actual age before it's a reliable sign that they're in poor health. It was also very interesting to discover that many people who look their age are in poor health. Doctors need to remember that even if patients look their age, we shouldn't assume that their health is fine."

The observational study, published in the Journal of General Internal Medicine, suggests that a person who looks younger isn't necessarily healthier, nor is a person who looks older necessarily in bad shape -- so it would benefit doctors to dig a bit deeper when evaluating their patients.

"It is one of those things that we're taught to do, but no one ever sits down and says this is why you should do it," Hwang told AOL Health.

Posted by Clay Kohut at 12:00 AM