A study led by Australians and Britons links faster biological aging to renting compared to owning a home, regardless of whether the owner owns social or private housing.
The study, which has been published in 'BMJ', was led by researchers from the Housing Research Centre at the University of Adelaide in Australia and the Institute of Social and Economic Research at the University of Essex, Colchester, UK, according to the newspaper Europa Press, Madrid, Spain.
The findings suggest that the biological impact of renting, as opposed to owner-occupied housing, is almost twice that of being unemployed versus having paid employment. Fortunately, these effects are reversible, highlighting the importance of housing policy in improving health, the researchers say.
Numerous aspects of housing are associated with physical and mental health, including cold, mold, overcrowding, risk of injury, stress, and stigma. But it's not entirely clear exactly how these factors might exert their effects, the researchers note.
To explore this further, they relied on epigenetic information along with data from social surveys and signs of biological aging, captured through evidence of DNA methylation in blood. Epigenetics describes how behaviors and environmental factors can trigger changes that alter how genes function, while DNA methylation is a chemical modification of DNA that can alter gene expression, the publication notes.
They used representative data from the UK Longitudinal Household Study (UKHLS, commonly referred to as Understanding Society) and responses from the British Household Panel Survey (BHPS), which also became part of Understanding Society.
They extracted information available from the UKHLS on material elements of housing: tenure; type of construction; government financial support available to tenants; presence of central heating as an indicator of adequate warmth; and location in urban or rural areas. Psychosocial elements were also included: housing costs; rent arrears; overcrowding; and shifting expectations and preferences.
Additional health information was subsequently collected from the 1,420 BHPS respondents, and blood samples were taken for DNA methylation analysis. Information on historical housing circumstances was obtained by pooling responses from the last 10 years of the BHPS survey for each respondent.
In analyzing all the data, the researchers considered potentially influential factors: sex, nationality, education level, socioeconomic status, diet, cumulative stress, financial hardship, urban environments, weight (BMI), and smoking. Because the rate of biological aging accelerates along with chronological aging, this was also taken into account.
The analysis has shown that living in a privately rented home is associated with faster biological aging. Furthermore, the impact of private rental, as opposed to outright ownership (without a mortgage), was almost twice as great as being unemployed versus employed. It was also 50 percent greater than being a former smoker compared to never having smoked.
When historical housing circumstances were added to the mix, repeated delays in homeownership and exposure to pollution and environmental problems were also associated with faster biological aging. However, living in social housing, with its lower cost and greater tenure security, was no different from outright homeownership in terms of its association with biological aging once additional housing variables were included.
The researchers emphasize that this is an observational study and, as such, cannot establish causation. They also acknowledge several limitations of their findings. For example, there were no contemporary measures of housing quality, and the DNA methylation data came only from white European respondents.
"Our results suggest that difficult housing circumstances negatively affect health through accelerated biological aging. However, biological aging is reversible, highlighting the significant potential of changes in housing policies to improve health," they state.
They suggest that their findings are likely relevant to housing and health elsewhere, particularly in countries with similar housing policies. "What it means to be a private tenant is not set in stone, but rather depends on policy decisions, which to date have prioritized landlords and investors over tenants," they add.
"Policies to reduce the stress and uncertainty associated with private renting, such as ending 'no-fault' evictions, limiting rent increases and improving conditions, can contribute to some extent to reducing the negative impacts of private renting," it concludes.
