Cleveland Twin Sisters Study: How Lifestyle Affects Facial Aging

Many factors that make your face age prematurely are lifestyle choices you make.

Some pretty convincing evidence that lifestyle choices can dramatically affect how we age was reported in the April 2009 issue of Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery (the Journal of the American Society of Plastic Surgeons).

Plastic surgeon Dr. Bahman Guyuron and colleagues conducted the study under the auspices of Cleveland’s Case Western Reserve University. A comprehensive questionnaire was filled out by each volunteer and digital images were taken of 186 sets of identical twins attending the annual Twins Day Festival in Twinsburg, Ohio.

[Let’s have a round of applause for the gracious ladies who participated.]

An independent panel later reviewed each set of photos and assigned a perceived age to each one, along with notations regarding the specific features that contributed to the assessment (e.g. blotchiness with many discolorations in right twin, deeper naso-labial folds in left twin, more pronounced forehead creases in left twin).

Then the research team mined the questionnaire and independent panel data for statistical correlations between perceived age and environmental factors which differed from twin to twin.

Though the study looked at “environmental factors” – some of which people may have little control over (such as cancer, divorce and depression), I first want to look at the life choices which are somewhat within one’s control.

Tomorrow – the lifestyle choices that cause premature facial aging.

Tags: premature aging, twin study on aging, lifestyle choices cause premature aging, smoking affects skin age, sun affects skin age, weight affects skin age, excess alcohol affects skin age, HRT affects skin age