The Way You Talk May Reveal Clues About How Well You’re Aging

When you think about how quickly you’re aging, sun-damaged skin or creaky joints may be the first things to come to mind. But a new study suggests that voice changes may also reveal clues about how well and how fast you’re aging.

“We already knew that voices change with age and that certain speech patterns appear in diseases like dementia,” says James Alrassi, MD, an instructor in otolaryngology and head and neck surgery at Harvard Medical School in Boston, who was not involved in the study.

“What’s new here is that how much ‘older’ a person’s voice sounds than their real age acts as a good surrogate of how the entire body is aging,” says Dr. Alrassi, who is also a doctor and surgeon at Mass Eye and Ear in Boston.

Teaching a Computer to Hear the Sound of Aging

To examine the connections between voice, speech, and aging, researchers recorded nearly 3,000 Spanish-speaking adults across five Latin American countries. Participants included cognitively healthy adults as well as people diagnosed with mild cognitive impairment (early-stage changes in thinking or memory), Alzheimer’s disease, or frontotemporal dementia, a less common form that strikes earlier in life.

Scientists recorded each person describing a short video, naming as many animals as they could in a minute, and retelling a story, once right away and again after a short delay.

A machine-learning model (a type of artificial intelligence, or AI), dubbed a “speech clock” by researchers, analyzed hundreds of details in each recording, including:

• How fast someone spoke and how long they paused
• The pitch and emotional tone of their voice
• How specific or vague their word choices were
• How much they said overall

AI combined these features to estimate chronological age and generate an individual’s “speech-age gap,” or the difference between a person’s actual age and their speech-predicted age. A positive number meant someone’s voice sounded older than they really were; a negative number meant it sounded younger.

People With an ‘Older’ Voice Tended to Have Other Signs of Accelerated Aging

Cognitively healthy participants had the smallest speech-age gaps. People with mild cognitive impairment (early-stage memory or thinking decline), Alzheimer’s disease, and frontotemporal dementia showed progressively larger ones, with the form that most directly affects language associated with the largest gaps of all.

People whose voices sounded older than their actual age also tended to show other signs of aging happening elsewhere in the body. For example, larger speech-age gaps were tied to advanced biological age on two other kinds of tests: brain scans and a set of markers that estimate how “old” a person’s DNA appears.

In people with Alzheimer’s disease, a larger gap was linked to higher blood levels of p-tau217, one of the most reliable markers of Alzheimer’s-related changes in the brain.

A larger gap was also linked to worse performance on tests of memory and executive function — meaning skills like planning and self-control, even on tasks that had nothing to do with language.

Greater Lifetime Adversity Also Linked to ‘Older’ Voice

People with more difficult life circumstances, including less access to education, food, and healthcare, tended to have larger gaps, too — both healthy adults and people with Alzheimer’s disease.

Senior study author Agustín Ibañez, PhD, a professor of brain health at the Global Brain Health Institute and School of Medicine at Trinity College Dublin, says what stood out to him was how many bodily systems lined up with “voice age”: not just memory and thinking skills, but brain scans, DNA, and even a person’s social and financial circumstances.

Although the study wasn’t designed to investigate the “why” behind those connections, one theory is that long-term social adversity becomes embedded in biology and brain health, and may ultimately be reflected in everyday behaviors such as speech, says Dr. Ibañez.

The Voice Could Be an Inexpensive Way to Measure Brain and Overall Health

“This new study can shed light on whether accelerated vocal aging can potentially serve as a digital biomarker of frailty and functional aging in older adults,” says Julie Ngoc Thai, MD, MPH, a clinical assistant professor of medicine in primary care and population health at Stanford Health in California, who was not involved in the study. In other words, an older-sounding voice might flag general physical decline, not just dementia risk specifically.

Speech may also offer a low-cost window into the same aging processes that normally take a brain scan, a blood draw, or a DNA test to measure, says Ibañez. Voice recordings, by contrast, are cheap and can be collected remotely, even by phone, which could eventually help flag people who’d benefit from a closer look, especially in places where that kind of testing is hard to get, he says.

Some Voice Changes Are Noticeable Without Any Special Technology

“The voice changes with age because speaking depends on many parts of the body working together,” says Alrassi.

“As we get older, the brain may become slightly slower at coordinating speech and finding the right words, while loss of volume and power in the vocal cords and breathing can affect the strength and quality of our voice,” he says.

Some of these changes are noticeable without any special technology, says Ibañez, including slower speech, longer pauses, a flatter emotional tone, trouble finding the right word, or vaguer, less specific language.

“But on their own, these signs are subtle, vary a lot from person to person, and aren’t unique to aging or dementia,” he says. The advantage of a computational tool, he adds, is that it can track hundreds of small changes at once, rather than relying on any single one.

Strengths and Limitations of the Study

This study drew on an unusually large and diverse group, spanning five Latin American countries, a region historically underrepresented in dementia research. It also combined speech, blood work, brain scans, and cognitive testing, which allowed researchers to validate the speech clock against several other aging measures at once.

The study was cross-sectional, meaning everyone was assessed once rather than followed over time. That means the results can’t prove whether a person’s speech-age gap changes with age, or predict who will go on to develop dementia.

“This study was a one-time snapshot and needs validation in other languages and real-world settings before clinical use,” says Alrassi. Additionally, because the study only looked at one point in time, it can’t say whether social hardship actually causes faster aging or simply exists alongside it.

Can Trying to Make Your Speech ‘Younger’ Help You Be Healthier?

This study didn’t test whether changing how someone speaks actually slows aging, and Ibañez doesn’t recommend trying to ‘train’ your speech to obtain a younger speech age.

“The more interesting question is the reverse: If we improve brain health through effective interventions, does the speech clock also move toward a healthier trajectory?” he says.

But some aspects of biological aging are at least partly changeable, says Alrassi. “Healthy diets like the Mediterranean, DASH, and MIND [diets], and regular exercise, are tied to lower dementia risk and to a measurably slower pace of biological aging,” he says.

What You Can Do About an Aging Voice

Most voice changes that come with age are harmless, says Alrassi. However, the following changes warrant a trip to see your healthcare provider, he says:

• Hoarseness lasting more than three to four weeks
• A lump in the neck
• Trouble swallowing

“The goal is not necessarily to make every aging voice sound younger, but to help each person maintain the voice and level of function that matter to them,” he says.

Age-related voice weakening, known as presbyphonia, is treatable. “The first-line intervention for an aging voice is voice therapy, where older adults can work with speech pathologists and/or therapists on vocal exercises, respiratory support, and resonance training,” says Dr. Thai.

If you notice your voice getting softer, breathier, or weaker, that’s worth mentioning at your next checkup, she says. Your primary care provider can refer you to the right specialist.