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Long-term exposure to extreme heat events accelerates the body’s ageing process and increases vulnerabilities to heath issues, finds a long-term study of 24,922 people in Taiwan.
The study, published today in Nature Climate Change1, suggests that moderate increases in cumulative heatwave exposure increase a person’s biological age — to an extent comparable to regular smoking or alcohol consumption. The more extreme-heat events that people were exposed to, the more their organs aged. This is the latest study to show that extreme heat can have invisible effects on the human body and accelerate the biological clock.
Exposure to extreme heat, especially over long periods of time, strains organs and can be lethal, but “the fact that heatwaves age us is surprising”, says Paul Beggs, an environmental-health scientist at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia, who was not involved in the research. “This study is a wake-up call that we are all vulnerable to the adverse impacts of climate change on our health. It reinforces calls for urgent and deep reduction in greenhouse-gas emissions,” he adds.”
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-02729-x
