ArticleBMC medicine2022
A healthy lifestyle is positively associated with mental health and well-being and core markers in ageing.
Article in BMC medicine, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 41 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
41 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it, 94 citations in OpenAlex.
- Olympic combat sports and mental health in children and adolescents with disability: a systematic review of controlled trials.Frontiers in psychology · 2025Pooled it
- Plant-Based Diet Indices and Depression in University Students: The Nuts4Brain-Z Study.Nutrients · 2026Article
- Health Disparities Between Stress-Related Mental Health Conditions and Chronic Physical Health Conditions Among Hispanic and Latinx Sexual and Gender Minority Individuals: Findings from the All of Us Research Program.Psychology of sexual orientation and gender diversity · 2026Article
- A Twin Study on the Relation Between Positive Mental Health and Biological Aging.International journal of molecular sciences · 2026Article
- Mapping the Biopsychosocial and Lifestyle Portrait of Adults With Congenital Heart Disease: A Comparative Study Across Sex and Age.CJC pediatric and congenital heart disease · 2026Article
- The pursuit of understanding human longevity.npj aging · 2026Article
- Associations between the Mediterranean lifestyle and incident age-related eye diseases: a longitudinal analysis from the UK Biobank.Journal of global health · 2026Article
- Molecular markers, mechanisms and metrics of biological aging: a scoping review.Frontiers in aging · 2026Review
- Lifestyle Mediates the Associations of Social Media and Smartphone Use Addiction with Sleep Quality and Mental Health Problems in Adults: An Exploratory Study.Psychology research and behavior management · 2026Article
- Maternal psychiatric disorders before, during, and after pregnancy: a national cohort study in Sweden.Molecular psychiatry · 2026Article
- Differential Impact of eHealth Literacy on Wellness Behaviors of Iranian Nurses: Descriptive Correlational Cross-Sectional Study.Asian/Pacific Island nursing journal · 2025Article
- Causal association of dietary intake habits and telomere lengths: A Mendelian randomization study.Asia Pacific journal of clinical nutrition · 2025Article
- Article
- Association between subjective well-being and the risk of cardiovascular diseases among older adults: evidence from the Chinese longitudinal healthy longevity survey.BMC geriatrics · 2025Article
- Unhealthy lifestyles accelerated aging and consequential musculoskeletal morbidity.Journal of bone and mineral metabolism · 2025Article
- The Role of High-SensitivityNutrients · 2025Article
- Body mass index having a mediating role between diet quality & mental and physical health among women.BMC psychology · 2025Article
- Identifying behavior regulatory leverage over mental disorders transcriptomic network hubs toward lifestyle-dependent psychiatric drugs repurposing.Human genomics · 2025Article
- Association of health locus of control with anxiety and depression and mediating roles of health risk behaviors among college students.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Targeting Aging Skin with GABALAGENAntioxidants (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
7 authors at 3 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
backgroundStudies often evaluate mental health and well-being in association with individual health behaviours although evaluating multiple health behaviours that co-occur in real life may reveal important insights into the overall association. Also, the underlying pathways of how lifestyle might affect our health are still under debate. Here, we studied the mediation of different health behaviours or lifestyle factors on mental health and its effect on core markers of ageing: telomere length (TL) and mitochondrial DNA content (mtDNAc).
methodsIn this study, 6054 adults from the 2018 Belgian Health Interview Survey (BHIS) were included. Mental health and well-being outcomes included psychological and severe psychological distress, vitality, life satisfaction, self-perceived health, depressive and generalised anxiety disorder and suicidal ideation. A lifestyle score integrating diet, physical activity, smoking status, alcohol consumption and BMI was created and validated. On a subset of 739 participants, leucocyte TL and mtDNAc were assessed using qPCR. Generalised linear mixed models were used while adjusting for a priori chosen covariates.
resultsThe average age (SD) of the study population was 49.9 (17.5) years, and 48.8% were men. A one-point increment in the lifestyle score was associated with lower odds (ranging from 0.56 to 0.74) for all studied mental health outcomes and with a 1.74% (95% CI: 0.11, 3.40%) longer TL and 4.07% (95% CI: 2.01, 6.17%) higher mtDNAc. Psychological distress and suicidal ideation were associated with a lower mtDNAc of - 4.62% (95% CI: - 8.85, - 0.20%) and - 7.83% (95% CI: - 14.77, - 0.34%), respectively. No associations were found between mental health and TL.
conclusionsIn this large-scale study, we showed the positive association between a healthy lifestyle and both biological ageing and different dimensions of mental health and well-being. We also indicated that living a healthy lifestyle contributes to more favourable biological ageing.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.