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“I only know what I know
The passing years will show
You kept my love so young
So new…”

-Styne & Cahn - “Time After Time”

Sometimes science is about quantifying or providing evidence to support a hypothesis that is fairly obvious. Some people call this “no duh” science; my boss is a bit more colorful - she calls such research “results from the Journal of the Bloody Obvious”. This week, an Australian study in BMC Immunity & Ageing treads on this territory. But the role for “bloody obvious” research is to provide empirical evidence and sometimes a scientific explanation for things that everyone “knows” but no one has “proven”. It’s probably pretty universally accepted that long term drug addiction is not beneficial to one’s health. If you’ve ever seen an ageing junky (Keith Richards being an excellent example) it’s pretty obvious that heroin addicts don’t age well. Compare, for example, the two pictures of jazz great Chet Baker. The first was taken when Baker was in his early 20’s the second, after two decades of heroin addiction, was taken when he was 46. Research published yesterday by Stuart Reece of the Herston Medical School in Brisbane, Australia seeks to demonstrate for the first time a biological connection between addiction and premature ageing.

There is a whole branch of medical research surrounding what happens as the body ages. There are a number of biological measurements that can be used as an indication of tissues ageing, these are known as “biomarkers” which are indicative of cell death and dysfunction of the immune system. The immune system in particular seems to be a lynch pin in the aging process. Our bodies are constantly bombarded with nasties - bacteria, viruses, toxic chemicals and the like - and every time we’re exposed to one of these antigens the immune system responds. Some scientists think that as the body gets older the immune system just runs out of steam and ultimately we succumb.

Drug addicts aren’t a particularly healthy lot. The mortality rate for addicts is 10 to 70 times higher than non-addicts. Drug addicts tend toward all sorts of psychological and, more relevant to this study, physical ailments including disorders typically found in the elderly like hair and tooth loss, osteoporosis and arteriosclerosis. This led Reece to form the hypothesis that what long term drug addiction was doing was speeding up the ageing process. In other words, addicts are bombarding their systems with antigens in the form of heroin, speeding up the defeat of the immune system.

The study is pretty straightforward - a comparison of aging “biomarkers” or various biological measurements from blood samples of either heroin (or other opiate) addicts or non- addict patients of Reece’s clinic. It’s a huge clinical sample, they take measurements on 734 addicts and 5,834 non-addicts between 15 and 45 years old. The results are pretty straightforward as well, five of ten biomarkers tested indicate premature aging in addicts relative to non-addicts. Four of the markers were unchanged and one was worse in non-addicts than in addicts. While this may not sound like a definitive result, the markers that are different in addicted patients correspond to an overactive immune system specifically in the kidneys and liver - organs that make their living dealing with toxins. There was one piece of good news for addicts - their cholesterol levels were significantly lower than non-addicts. These results can be seen to support Reece’s idea that the drugs and other toxins that addicts habitually expose themselves to are overworking the immune system. If you accept the hypothesis that a big part of aging is the immune system petering out, then its conceivable that addicts are speeding up the ageing process.

There are some flaws in this study. Reece doesn’t take the length of time that his addicts have been active users. There is no analysis of the effects of sex or age of the patients other than for one of the biomarkers. The biggest, as I see it, is pointed out in one of his table. In the clinical sample he finds, not surprisingly, that addicts also use alcohol, tobacco and other drugs more frequently than non-addicts. However, his results don’t take the detrimental effect of these two drugs into account. Reece could probably make a direct comparison between addicts and non-addicts that exhibit similar use of alcohol and tobacco. This would certainly reduce the size of the study, but would ultimately be a more accurate analysis of the effect of opiate addiction. As it stands, what this study actually discovers is that junkies lead a generally more unhealthy lifestyle than non-junkies and their health suffers for it - particularly their liver and kidneys. Pretty bloody obvious. What is interesting about this study is the finding that the immune system in the addicts is hyperstimulated which indicates that from an immunological perspective, hard living makes the years slip away more quickly.