There’s a lot of baggage attached to the first time. How old you were, whether you regret it, and whether the other person deserved to be there. Well, now you can add one more thing to that list: it might have something to say about how your body ages for decades to come.
A new study out of Shandong University in China found that the age at which people first have sex is potentially linked to health outcomes in older adulthood, including frailty and overall quality of life. Researchers used Mendelian randomization, a method that tests cause-and-effect using genetic data, to see whether people with gene variants associated with earlier sexual activity showed any differences in how they aged. They did, and it wasn’t flattering.
Those with a genetic predisposition toward an earlier sexual debut tended to score worse across a range of aging-related measures, including longevity indicators, frailty scores, and self-rated health. “Our findings suggest that the timing of first sexual intercourse may be connected to aging through multiple psychological, behavioral, and disease-related pathways,” said first author Kaixian Wang.
The Age You Lose Your Virginity Might Be Linked to How Your Body Ages Later in Life
To find out what was actually doing the damage, researchers combed through 145 possible contributing factors. Four rose to the top: physical frailty, low mood, COPD (the lung disease most commonly tied to smoking), and ADHD. So the connection between early sexual activity and worse aging outcomes appears to run through a pretty grim cluster of mental health struggles, chronic illness risk, and impulsivity.
The researchers were careful not to overstate things. “Our findings do not mean a single behavior determines a person’s future health,” Wang said. “Instead, they highlight how early-life experiences may cluster with mental health challenges, chronic disease risks, and functional decline over time.” The sex, researchers suspect, is almost beside the point.
The findings fall against a pretty interesting backdrop. Americans are losing their virginity later than they used to. The median age for first intercourse has hovered around 17 for years, but it’s been creeping up. Gen Z is delaying or skipping sex altogether—in 2021, only 30% of teenage Gen Z respondents told the CDC they’d ever had sexual intercourse, down from more than half three decades earlier. Researchers blame everything from screen time to pandemic fallout.
Whether waiting longer is actually protective or merely correlated with other healthy habits remains an open question. But if your teenage self was already behind the curve, maybe that’s not the worst news you’ve gotten this week.
The post Scientists Found a Link Between When You Lose Your Virginity and How You Age, but It’s Complicated appeared first on VICE.
