Visiting a Museum Once a Week Slows Biological Aging as Much as Regular Exercise

Methyl molecules attach to DNA at predictable sites across the genome, accumulating over a lifetime in patterns so regular that researchers can read them like a clock. The marks don’t alter the underlying genetic code, but they change how genes behave, toggling them on or off in ways that track the ageing process with striking fidelity. Extract DNA from a blood sample, measure the methylation at a few thousand carefully chosen sites, and you get a number: not chronological age, exactly, but biological age, the body’s own estimate of how worn it is. In recent years, a new class of these clocks has gone further still, measuring not just biological age but the pace at which it’s accumulating. How fast, right now, are you ageing? The answer, it turns out, may partly depend on whether you went to the theatre last month.

A study published this week in Innovation in Aging provides the first evidence that arts and cultural engagement is linked to slower epigenetic ageing, with effects comparable in magnitude to those seen for physical exercise. The findings, from a UCL team led by Professor Daisy Fancourt, add a genuinely unexpected entry to the list of behaviours that seem to slow biological time.

The team drew on data from 3,556 adults in the UK Household Longitudinal Study, a nationally representative cohort whose participants gave blood samples between 2010 and 2012. From those samples, researchers had already derived seven epigenetic clocks, spanning three generations of increasingly sophisticated design. The oldest clocks were trained purely on chronological age; newer ones incorporate clinical biomarkers of disease and mortality; the newest measure the rate of ageing itself, tracking how many biological years accumulate per calendar year. Fancourt’s team assessed how frequently and how diversely participants engaged in arts and cultural activities: participatory arts like singing, dancing, or crafting; visiting galleries and heritage sites; going to museums, libraries, archives. They then compared this with the clock readings, controlling for income, education, smoking, BMI, drinking, and a range of other potential confounders using a doubly robust statistical method designed to reduce the risk of misleading results from residual confounding.

Only the Newest Clocks Picked Up the Signal

The effects showed up consistently, but only in the newer clocks. Not a single first-generation clock registered any benefit for either arts engagement or exercise. That’s not a failure of the method; it replicates exactly what previous studies have found when testing physical activity. First-generation clocks, the researchers argue, are less sensitive to protective health behaviours because they were trained on cross-sectional data and don’t incorporate the clinical markers most responsive to lifestyle change.

The second- and third-generation clocks told a different story. For PhenoAge, which incorporates phenotypic biomarkers of mortality risk, people who engaged in arts activities at least monthly had a biological age roughly a year younger than those who rarely engaged. Weekly arts participants were, on average, about a year younger biologically than the low-engagement group. The third-generation pace-of-ageing clocks showed a dose-response pattern: engaging three or more times a year was linked to ageing roughly 2% more slowly; monthly engagement brought that to 4%; weekly engagement to around 3%. The range isn’t perfectly linear, and the team notes confidence intervals are wide enough that these shouldn’t be read too precisely. But the direction is consistent across both frequency and diversity of engagement.

That second dimension, diversity, matters more than you might expect. People who engaged in the widest range of arts activities showed the largest benefits, even after controlling for how often they engaged. Fancourt’s explanation draws on the idea that different arts activities carry different “active ingredients”: social stimulation from choir rehearsals, cognitive challenge from reading, sensory engagement from live music, physical movement from dance. Each may activate distinct biological pathways. “Our study also suggests that engaging in a variety of arts activities may be helpful,” she said. “This may be because each activity has different ‘ingredients’ that help health, such as physical, cognitive, emotional or social stimulation.”

The proposed mechanism runs, roughly, through stress. Arts engagement has been repeatedly shown to reduce psychophysiological markers of stress: cortisol, inflammatory cytokines, blood pressure. Chronic psychosocial stress is one of the better-established accelerants of epigenetic ageing, disrupting methylation patterns in ways that compound over time. If arts activities buffer against that accumulation of stress-driven epigenetic damage, then you’d expect to see exactly the kind of signal found here. There’s also experimental evidence that music listening, specifically, upregulates genes involved in dopamine secretion and neurogenesis while suppressing microRNAs that would otherwise promote inflammation. The mechanistic picture is still fairly sketchy, but it has more pieces than it did.

Arts and Exercise Show Comparable Effects

The exercise comparison is worth dwelling on. For the DunedinPACE clock, which the researchers consider their most reliable outcome measure, the effect sizes for arts engagement and physical activity were broadly similar. Weekly exercisers showed about 0.59 fewer years on PhenoAge compared to sedentary participants; weekly arts engagers showed around a year fewer. On the pace-of-ageing clocks, both activities were associated with 2-4% slower ageing rates. “Our study provides the first evidence that arts and cultural engagement is linked to a slower pace of biological ageing,” said Dr Feifei Bu, senior author on the paper. “This builds on a growing body of evidence about the health impact of the arts, with arts activities being shown to reduce stress, lower inflammation and improve cardiovascular disease risk, just as exercise is known to do.”

There are real limitations here. The blood samples are over a decade old, from a subsample of white European participants, and the exposure data relies on self-report, which brings the usual risks of recall and social desirability bias. The study design is observational; it can’t tell us whether arts engagement caused the slower ageing or whether healthier, more socially connected people are simply more likely to visit galleries. The doubly robust estimation approach is methodologically rigorous, but residual confounding from unmeasured factors remains possible. And the blood-based methylation data may not capture what’s happening in tissues more directly relevant to particular activities, muscle tissue for exercise, say, or neural tissue for music.

The effects were consistently stronger in adults aged 40 and above, which fits with what researchers know about epigenetic ageing: it appears to accelerate meaningfully in midlife, making the 40s perhaps the decade when protective behaviours start to register most clearly in the molecular record. Whether starting earlier provides compounding benefits, or whether late adoption can reverse accumulated epigenetic damage, remains genuinely open. Recent work suggests epigenetic ageing may be partially reversible, which is a more optimistic framing than the field offered even five years ago.

Professor Fancourt, who holds a UNESCO Chair in Arts and Global Health, has spent nearly a decade building the epidemiological case for arts as a health behaviour. This study positions the argument at a deeper biological level than before. “These results demonstrate the health impact of the arts at a biological level,” she said. “They provide evidence for arts and cultural engagement to be recognised as a health-promoting behaviour in a similar way to exercise.” Whether that translates into public health guidance, the way physical activity recommendations eventually did, is a longer conversation. But the molecular bookmarks in your DNA don’t seem to care much whether you got your weekly stimulation on a treadmill or in front of a Rothko.

https://doi.org/10.1093/geroni/igag038

Frequently Asked Questions

What does it mean for arts engagement to slow biological ageing?

Biological ageing, as measured here, refers to chemical changes in DNA called methylation that accumulate over time and track closely with health and disease risk. Epigenetic clocks read these patterns to estimate not just how old someone is but how quickly they are ageing. People who regularly engaged in arts and cultural activities showed slower rates of methylation change, suggesting their bodies were accumulating the molecular wear of ageing less rapidly than those who rarely engaged.

Is the effect as large as exercise?

Broadly, yes, at least on the clocks that showed any effect. On the third-generation DunedinPACE clock, which the researchers consider their strongest measure, the effect sizes for arts engagement and physical activity were comparable, with both linked to roughly 2 to 4% slower biological ageing rates compared to low-engagement groups. On PhenoAge, weekly arts participants appeared about a year younger biologically, while weekly exercisers appeared roughly half a year younger. These are averages across a large sample, not guarantees for any individual.

Why did only some of the seven clocks show an effect?

The seven clocks used in the study span three generations of design. The older, first-generation clocks were trained purely on chronological age and appear less sensitive to protective lifestyle behaviours, replicating what other studies have found. The newer second- and third-generation clocks incorporate clinical biomarkers of disease and mortality, making them better at detecting the kinds of changes associated with healthier behaviours. Finding effects only in the newer clocks is therefore expected, not a sign of cherry-picking.

Does the type of arts activity matter, or is it enough to do anything?

Both frequency and diversity appear to matter. Engaging in a wider range of arts and cultural activities was independently linked to slower biological ageing, even after accounting for how often people engaged. The researchers suggest that different activities provide different biological and psychological benefits, social, cognitive, sensory, and physical, and that variety offers broader exposure to these mechanisms. Singing in a choir, visiting a gallery, and reading a novel may each contribute something distinct.

Can this research prove that arts engagement causes slower ageing?

No. The study is observational, meaning it can show an association but cannot rule out the possibility that healthier or more socially advantaged people are simply more likely to engage with arts and also happen to age more slowly for other reasons. The researchers used a sophisticated statistical method to reduce confounding, and the effects persisted after adjusting for smoking, BMI, income, and education, but residual confounding from unmeasured factors remains possible. Controlled intervention studies would be needed to establish causation more firmly.