As I write this on Saturday, the temp outside my NorCal home is 101oF but this isn’t official heat wave with NWS warnings and temporary cooling centers set up for people without ACs. The official heat wave is in the midwest and eastern states and Europe. Because this is our expected weather, I’ve already made the usual summer adaptations to maximize repelling heat and retaining cool, such as those I included in my previous heat wave story in late June 2022: Since it’s only going to get hotter, let’s learn how to cope with heat waves.
I return to this topic three years later with new warnings about the dangers of extreme or prolonged heat: unacknowledged mental health consequences and accelerated aging impacts comparable to those from smoking or heavy use of alcohol.
Older adults are especially vulnerable because aging reduces one’s ability to effectively regulate body temperature. Also, older people are more likely to take drugs such as beta blockers and diuretics that make it harder to cope with high temps, so even moderate heat can be a health risk.
The takeaway message for everyone on earth, even people who live where high temps in summer are unremarkable, is to take high temps seriously. Helpful measures include more cooling centers open to everyone, improved regulations that protect outdoor workers, awareness campaigns so people at greater risk understand the consequences, and the basic tricks we Californians already implement.
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A new study published in Current Environmental Health Reports finds that the world is startlingly unprepared to deal with the mental health consequences of climate change. Of 83 action plans for heat-related health problems that were reviewed for the study, fewer than a third acknowledged the mental health effects of extreme or prolonged high temperatures. And only a fifth of these plans outlined specific actions to deal with contingencies such as increased hospitalizations for mental health disorders. [...]
Exposure to extreme heat can also increase the risk of suicide and can worsen schizophrenia, epilepsy, anxiety, depression, substance use disorder, neurodegenerative disorders (such as Alzheimer’s disease) and negative emotions such as fear and anger. It may worsen sleep, which, in turn, can increase fatigue and impair cognition.
Alcohol and recreational drugs, as well as certain medications used to treat mental illness, such as antidepressants, tranquilizers and antipsychotics, also appear to increase mental health vulnerability to heat.
Studies find an increased risk of suicide and epileptic seizures during heat waves, as well as an increase in hospitalizations and emergency-room visits for mental health disorders. Heat can also disorient thinking, making people slow to realize that they need to seek shelter or help.
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Hot take: Heat waves might literally be aging your DNA.
Researchers found that people in hotter regions show faster biological aging, even after accounting for lifestyle differences.
(By Eunyoung Choi @usc.edu)
buff.ly/mVNLxuA
#health #summer #heatwave
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— The Conversation U.S. (@us.theconversation.com) June 28, 2025 at 10:33 AM
My colleagues and I examined blood samples from over 3,600 older adults across the United States. We measured their biological age using epigenetic clocks, which capture DNA modification patterns – methylation – that change with age. [...]
We found that older adults residing in areas with frequent very hot days showed significantly faster epigenetic aging compared with those living in cooler regions. For example, participants living in locations with at least 140 extreme heat days per year – classified as days when the heat index exceeded 90 degrees Fahrenheit (32.33 degrees Celsius) – experienced up to 14 months of additional biological aging compared with those in areas with fewer than 10 such days annually.
This link between biological age and extreme heat remained even after accounting for a wide range of individual and community factors such as physical activity levels and socioeconomic status. This means that even among people with similar lifestyles, those living in hotter environments may still be aging faster at the biological level.
Even more surprising was the magnitude of the effect – extreme heat has a comparable impact on speeding up aging as smoking and heavy alcohol consumption. This suggests that heat exposure may be silently accelerating aging, at a level on par with other major known environmental and lifestyle stressors.
