May 16, 2014 01:12 PM EDT By Jaleesa Baulkman, UniversityHerald Reporter

"Fat shaming" may be more harmful to a person's health than discrimination associated with racism or sexism, according to a recent study Campus Reform reported.

Researchers from Florida State University's College of Medicine suggest that perceived age and weight discrimination may be worse for health in older adults than perceived race and sex discrimination.

"The detrimental effect of discrimination on physical and emotional health ... [was] driven primarily by discrimination based on personal characteristics that change over time (e.g., age, weight) rather than discrimination based on more stable characteristics (e.g., race, sex)," states a summary of the study's findings, according to Campus Reform.

For the study, researchers collected data from more than 6,000 adults who participated in the Health and Requirement Study, a study of Americans ages 50 and older and their spouses. Participants reported on their physical, emotional and cognitive health in 2006 and 2010 and also reported on their perceived experiences with discrimination.

Based on the findings, discrimination based on weight, appearance, physical disability and age "was associated with poor subjective health, greater disease burden, lower life satisfaction, and greater loneliness ... with declines in health across the four years."

"We know how harmful discrimination based race and sex can be, so we were surprised that perceived discrimination based on more malleable characteristics like age and weight had a more pervasive effect on health than discrimination based on these more fixed characteristics," Angelina Sutin, lead author and assistant professor of behavioral sciences and social medicine, said in a statement.

According to Campus Reform, discrimination based on race, sex ancestry or sexual orientation was linked to greater loneliness, but those feelings did not intensify over time.

"Our previous research showed that perceived discrimination based on body weight was associated with risk of obesity. We wanted to see whether this association extended to other health indicators and types of discrimination," Sutin said. "What we found was unexpected and striking."

The findings were recently published in The American Journal of Geriatric Psychiatry.

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