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If you are more impatient, then you age faster than your patient peers, says a new study conducted by National University of Singapore (NUS) researchers. It tends to lead to shorter leukocyte telomeres.

This is the first study that connects impatience to a molecular marker of human cellular aging.

Studying a group of 1,158 young, healthy undergraduates at NUS, the team subjected them to a behavioral economic game to see how much impatience each member underwent. The team wanted to check whether each participant opted for an immediate gain or delayed gratification.  

Later, the team examined each patient's telomeres. These are the caps at the end of DNA strands that protect chromosomes. The length of each telomere decreases every time a cell divides and ages.

Impatient women in the initial behavioral economic game showed shorter telomere lengths, indicating that they were aging at a higher rate at the "cellular level".

"Our team is among the pioneers in leveraging the natural synergy between behavioral economics and molecular genetics to seek a deeper understanding of how people make decisions. The present paper illustrates the promise of this approach in delivering a fresh understanding linking impatience elicited from observable choice behavior with telomere length underpinning aging at the molecular level," Chew Soo Hong, who helped lead the study, said in a press release.

The study was published in Feb. 22, 2016 issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.