New research adds to a growing body of work illustrating the effect of gun violence on overall physical health.
Research has consistently shown that cigarette smoking, chronic stress, and a sedentary lifestyle can speed up a person’s biological clock. A new study suggests that aging may also be accelerated by exposure to gun violence, a finding that exposes the hidden toll of trauma.
In a report published in the September volume of SSM-Population Health, researchers showed how exposure to deadly neighborhood shootings affected nearly 1,800 15-year-olds. They found that over half of the teenagers in the sample lived near at least one deadly shooting in the prior year, and those exposed to gun violence showed an estimated two-and-a-half-month difference in biological age acceleration and a 5.3 percent faster pace of aging. To measure for aging, the study’s authors used three highly regarded epigenetic clocks — biochemical tests that estimate a body’s biological age.
As gun violence remains the leading cause of death for children and teens, researchers are examining how these deaths will negatively affect the younger generation’s health in the future. Adolescence is a particularly vulnerable period for exposure to trauma that can affect the longer-term trajectory of a person’s life.
“We often talk about the acute, direct effects of gun violence like firearm fatalities and we talk a little bit less about the thousands of non-fatal gun injuries in the U.S. and how those can have life-changing implications,” said Esther Lee, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Michigan’s Institute for Firearm Injury Prevention.
In 2025, Lee published a study that looked at the connection between cardiovascular death and gun violence among adults in Michigan. Her study found that each additional 10 firearm incidents per year within a census tract was linked to a 1.6 percent increase in the odds of stress-related cardiovascular death among residents.
“We talk even less about the downstream implications of gun violence when people are exposed to it in their communities,” Lee said. “So what’s interesting is that these sorts of studies are evidence that violence is physiologically embedded … which helps to understand some of these broader impacts of firearm injury, and to lay some of the fertile grounds for that.”
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