From Women’s Health:

Talk about a birthday gift I wish I could mark “return to sender.” Just two weeks shy of turning 42, this ominous headline crossed my Slack: “Human aging accelerates dramatically at age 44 and 60.” Now, I’m no great mathematician, but even I can deduce that in just two years, I’ll supposedly undergo a fit of rapid aging. In a word—yikes.

But let’s rewind for just a sec. That headline comes courtesy of a recent study out of Stanford Medicine, published in the journal Nature, which examined the very, well, nature of aging by studying participants’ molecules. (The study included 108 participants, both men and women, between the ages of 25 and 75.) What they found was that the molecules didn’t shift in numbers in a linear fashion over time, but in bursts around the ages of 44 and 60.

“It turns out the mid-40s is a time of dramatic change, as is the early 60s,” said study senior author Michael Snyder, PhD, professor of genetics at Stanford University School of Medicine. “And that’s true no matter what class of molecules you look at.”

Initially, researchers assumed that the mid-40s shift they noticed was due to the changes women in the test group were undergoing during perimenopause or menopause. But when they isolated just the men, the same shift was still evident, leading them to theorize that there are other underlying drivers of aging for both men and women that have nothing to do with perimenopause or menopause.