Volunteering, even in small amounts, is associated with slower age acceleration for both retirees and workers, according to a new study from the Brown School at Washington University in St. Louis.
“We found that moderate volunteering of 50 to 199 hours per year, or about 1 to 4 hours per week, had the greatest impact for retired people,” he said. Carl HalvorsenAssociate professor at Brown School and co-author of the studyDoes volunteering reduce the welfare age acceleration of retired and working older adults? Health and Retirement Study Results.” This study will be published in the January issue of the journal Social Science & Medicine.
“It is likely that the act of volunteering provided the social, meaningful interaction and physical activity that people still working were already receiving,” he said. “These traits are separately linked to less rapid epigenetic aging acceleration.”
Using data from the National Health and Retirement Study, the authors found that volunteering was associated with slowing biological aging.
Among retired individuals, moderate volunteer activity was significantly associated with a slowdown in epigenetic age acceleration, indicating a greater benefit for retirees compared to working individuals.
“That is, at a biological level, volunteers age slightly more slowly than non-volunteers,” Halvorsen said.
The more volunteers we have, the more pronounced the impact will be.
The health benefits of more than 200 hours of volunteer work are significant for both retirees and workers, suggesting that higher levels of volunteer participation may promote well-being regardless of job status.
“In general, we found that volunteering more than 200 hours per year (about four hours per week on average) was associated with the greatest decline in age acceleration,” Halvorsen said. “This type of sustained engagement is likely to provide a higher ‘capacity’ of social, physical, and purposeful interaction that we think is good for people.”
The benefits were even more pronounced for retired people, despite volunteering only 1 to 49 hours per year.
“This may be because volunteer work compensated for some of the beneficial effects of paid work participation that retirees no longer had,” he said. “So overall, I think we can say that volunteering in later life is generally good for you, but additional research could certainly help explain some of these specific findings.”
The authors took into account not only volunteer time but also additional health factors.
“Because we took many additional health factors into account when conducting the study, we feel more confident in the results,” Halvorsen said.
The researchers designed the study so that the volunteer and non-volunteer groups were fairly comparable on other characteristics.
“To better estimate the epigenetic age effect, we included self-reported health conditions and number of depressive symptoms in the weighting scheme,” he said. “In the final model, we also controlled for other health variables that are strongly associated with epigenetic aging, including frequency of physical activity, smoking status, binge drinking, and obesity.”
The other author of this study is senior author Seoyeon Kim of Texas State University. Claire Potter, Queen’s University Belfast; and Jessica Faul of the University of Michigan.
