aging

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June 21, 2012 | 9:06 AM |

Eating Disorders Afflict Older Women Too, Study Finds

(Alaina Abplanalp Photography/flickr)

Anorexia, bulimia, binge eating and compulsive dieting are popularly perceived as afflicting mostly teenagers and young women. Just watch “Girls.” Or recall all those eating disorder memoirs with names like “Wasted” “Stick Figure” and “Home Sick,” the one by Ralph Lauren’s niece, Jenny).

Well, it turns out that screwed up behavior around food and body image persists in women over 50 as well, according to new research out of the University North Carolina. Surprise.

Here’s part of the news release:

…a new study reveals that age is no barrier to disordered eating. In women aged 50 and over, 3.5% report binge eating, nearly 8% report purging, and more than 70% are trying to lose weight. The study published in the International Journal of Eating Disorders revealed that 62% of women claimed that their weight or shape negatively impacted on their life. Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Medicine/Science, Personal Health, aging, body image, eating disorders, women's health
June 1, 2012 | 4:38 PM |

Managing Menopause: Top Takeaways After Ten Years

Dr. JoAnn Manson considers the evolution of menopause management and hormone therapy (Brigham & Women's Hospital)

A decade after women tossed out their hormone pills in disgust and prescriptions for drugs like Premarin and Prempro plummeted, the management of menopause and its related symptoms has become much more personal, with highly individualized treatment plans and more nuanced assessments of risks and benefits.

Dr. JoAnn Manson, of Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School, was a principal investigator at the Boston site of the pivotal Women’s Health Initiative hormone trials, and says the initial results and subsequent analyses triggered a radical transformation of clinical care that “really changed women’s lives.”

“The WHI is an historic trial that has changed clinical practice and, ultimately, has helped lead us towards a more rational interpretation of the place of hormone therapy in menopause management,” Manson writes in a new editorial commemorating the 10th anniversary of the WHI trial report, published in the journal Menopause with co-author Lubna Pal, of Yale University School of Medicine.

This “more rational” approach to menopause management involves a much closer look at a woman’s personal medical history and specific risk factors, an in-depth discussion with a well-informed clinician on the risks and benefits of drugs and an honest assessment of how bad the symptoms are (whether hot flashes, or night sweats, sleeplessness or sex issues) and what the individual woman is willing to risk in order to alleviate those symptoms.

Manson offered the top takeaways for women currently facing menopause and wondering how to handle it:

1. If You Are Suffering
Hormone therapy continues to have a clinical role in the short-term treatment of hot flashes and night sweats, notes Manson. “If women have symptoms that are interfering with sleep or undermining quality of life, they should talk to a health care provider to see if they’re appropriate candidates for hormone therapy.”

2. Don’t Take What You Don’t Need
Women should not take hormones if they’re asymptomatic, she says. Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Medicine/Science, Personal Health, aging, menopause, women's health
May 18, 2012 | 9:46 AM |

Your Brain On Butter: The Fats That May Hasten Mental Decline

Researchers link saturated fats found in butter and red meat to cognitive and memory decline in older women. (madlyinlovewithlife/flickr)

What’s good for the heart is good for the brain, the medical thinking goes.

Here’s the latest twist: What’s bad for the heart turns out to be bad for the brain. Put another way, some fats may make us stupider — or at least less cognitively on the ball.

Amid growing evidence that what we eat has a profound impact on brain function, researchers at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston found that women who consumed the highest amounts of saturated fat — which can come from animal fats like red meat and butter — had worse overall cognitive function and memory over four years of testing compared to women who ate the lowest amounts of such fats. Moreover, women who consumed the most monounsaturated fats — think olive oil — scored better on the cognitive function tests over time.

(Trans-fats found in processed and baked goods — like those ginormous muffins they used to sell at the corner deli — are also considered “bad” but in this particular study, they weren’t associated with declines in cognitive ability.)

To be clear, this latest research doesn’t mean that if you start cooking with olive oil instead of butter you’ll suddenly be able to locate your car keys or remember your mother-in-law’s birthday.

But it does strongly suggest that the type of fat you eat matters, Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Medicine/Science, Personal Health, aging, cognitive function, diet, dietary fats, memory
April 13, 2012 | 5:18 PM |

Health Secrets From The 100-Year-Old Pitcher At Fenway’s Centennial

Bill Hogan doesn’t take any special vitamins and kale is not a mainstay of his diet.

But on Saturday, the lifelong Red Sox fan will celebrate his 100th birthday; and on that day, he’ll throw out the first pitch to commemorate the 100th birthday of Fenway Park.

Hogan is svelte and quick-witted, with an enviable memory and 18 great-grandchildren — all of whom will be at the Boston ballpark Saturday to join in the festivities.

Hogan’s secrets for longevity? Stand-up comedy, good genes, regular work-outs, lots of interesting friends and looking forward to the future.

“I do look forward to every day,” Hogan said in an interview. “Tomorrow, I’ll be 100…and Fenway is 100. I am looking forward to that.”

Born in Cambridge, Mass., Hogan attended Harvard Law School and had a long career as general counsel for New England Telephone. When his wife died 14 years ago, he moved to his own apartment in an assisted living facility in Lexington, Mass. where he now has a packed social calendar with poker games, bridge nights and lunch and dinner dates. Improv nights are a high point. “Last week, he did a five-minute standup routine at a comedy improv night,” one of his grandchildren, Austin O’Connor wrote in a loving profile published on the AARP website. “He says he killed.” Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Medicine/Science, Personal Health, aarp, aging, Red Sox
March 5, 2012 | 10:30 AM |

Why To Exercise Today: The Antidote To Muscle Loss

I feel a little preachy when I wear this to work out, but the phrase was echoing in my head so I took my Sharpie and made a T-shirt out of it.

Actually, I’m thinking I could make a whole series. (Or am I going a bit overboard on this “Why To Exercise” thing? It’s just that the evidence keeps mounting and mounting and mounting…) The next one would be “The antidote for anxiety is endorphins.” Then maybe, “The antidote for American life is the elliptical.” Readers, any others come to mind?

Meanwhile, my entropy shirt found a perfect echo today in this useful package on age-related muscle loss by the Boston Globe’s Deborah Kotz. She writes about research into muscle loss and its extreme form, known as sarcopenia, and notes:

For now, researchers acknowledge, the optimal treatment is prevention: By the time we hit middle age, we should start lifting weights at least twice a week to retain our muscle. And we need to provide our bodies with a steady intake of fuel throughout the day, in the form of protein, to manufacture the lean tissue.

Beginning at age 30, most of us lose about 1 percent – or a third of a pound – of muscle every year, as the body starts tearing down old muscle at a faster rate than it builds new tissue. (It’s why world weight-lifting records for the 60-year-old age bracket are 30 percent lower in men and 50 percent lower in women compared with records in the 30-year-old bracket.) The loss of muscle, which burns more calories than fat, slows the body’s resting metabolic rate, causing us to pack on fat pounds through the years. While we can’t completely halt this aging process, researchers believe we can do a lot to slow it down, mostly through resistance training, or weight training, that targets specific muscle groups.

Read her full story here and a sidebar on how much exercise you need to retain muscle here.

FILED UNDER: Personal Health, aging, muscle loss, why to exercise today
November 17, 2011 | 12:44 PM |

NPR: ’90 Is The New 85′ As Oldest Of Old Crowd Flourishes

I love this story.

Just look at 92-year-old Pete Seeger as he stands in solidarity with the kids of Occupy Wall Street leading them singing “The River That Flows.”

And there’s Betty White (she’s on the NPR story, not part of the protest march) nearly 90, and her perky, lipsticked smile. “90 is the new 85,” NPR reports, with the oldest of the old set rapidly expanding.

“From 720,000 in the year 1980 to more than 1.9 million in 2010, the number of Americans who are 90 years of age or older has nearly tripled, the Census Bureau reports today in its first comprehensive look at the over-90 population.

And according to the Census Bureau, “over the next four decades, this population is projected to more than quadruple.

The trend has researchers wondering whether the definition of the “oldest old” — generally, those 85 and older — should be reconsidered and start the group at 90 instead.”

FILED UNDER: Personal Health, aging, pete seeger
November 9, 2011 | 10:57 AM |

Why To Exercise Today: ‘Inexorable Decline’ May Really Stem From Inactivity

I gather that the Phys Ed column on nytimes.com is about fitness in general, but almost everything that columnist Gretchen Reynolds writes looks to me like one more reason to exercise.

Today brings the latest: That “inexorable decline” in muscle mass as we age may not be so inevitable after all. It may actually be the result of inactivity. Previous studies have found that people tend to lose about 8% of their muscle mass each decade from middle age on, but a new study looks at old athletes and finds a different story:

There was little evidence of deterioration in the older athletes’ musculature, however. The athletes in their 70s and 80s had almost as much thigh muscle mass as the athletes in their 40s, with minor if any fat infiltration. The athletes also remained strong. There was, as scientists noted, a drop-off in leg muscle strength around age 60 in both men and women. They weren’t as strong as the 50-year-olds, but the differential was not huge, and little additional decline followed. The 70- and 80-year-old athletes were about as strong as those in their 60s.

“We think these are very encouraging results,” said Dr. Vonda Wright, an orthopedic surgeon and founder of the Performance and Research Initiative for Masters Athletes at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, who oversaw the study. “They suggest strongly that people don’t have to lose muscle mass and function as they grow older. The changes that we’ve assumed were due to aging and therefore were unstoppable seem actually to be caused by inactivity. And that can be changed.”

Other recent studies have produced similar findings.

FILED UNDER: Personal Health, aging, fitness, why to exercise today
September 13, 2011 | 11:28 AM |

Questioning Medical Tests For The Over 70 Set

Are older folks getting too many medical tests?

Don’t miss this superb story examining out-of-control medical testing for older folks, some who are urged to get all sorts of pricey screenings even if they are over 80 or already suffering from a fatal illness, like late-stage lung cancer. The story reports on one woman who got her first mammogram at 100. Was that really necessary?

The piece, a collaboration between Kaiser Health News and The Washington Post, tracks the knee-jerk phenomenon that says all testing is wise, and finds a growing skepticism:

“An ounce of prevention can be a ton of trouble,” observed geriatrician Robert Jayes, an associate professor of medicine at George Washington University School of Medicine. “Screening can label someone with a disease they were blissfully unaware of.”

Dartmouth physician Lisa M. Schwartz cites one such case: a healthy 78-year-old man who was left incontinent and impotent by radiation treatments for prostate cancer, a disease that typically grows so slowly that many men die with — but not of — it. Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Medicine/Science, Personal Health, aging, medical testing
September 7, 2011 | 6:43 AM |

As you Age, A Drink A Day May Help Keep The Doctor Away

Just a quick note on my way to the package store:

In thousands of nurses, moderate drinking in mid-life appears to be linked to a healthier old age, according to a new study just published in the journal PLoS medicine.

Just joking about the package store. In fact, the study’s lead author, Dr. Qi Sun, an Instructor in Medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School, says the study’s results still leave him cautious about recommending that non-drinkers take up the bottle, because other research has found that even moderate drinking may slightly raise the risk of breast cancer.

But the results do mean, he said, that in people who already drink moderately, the benefits may be significant. So, to put his quantitative analysis into my own words, “Cheers!” (And don’t forget that exercise and healthy weight maintenance have also been shown to lead to a healthier old age.)

The study fits in to a growing body of research that has found health benefits from “moderate” drinking equivalent to about one-third glass to one glass of wine per day. It did not distinguish between types of alcohol, but Qi said that the nurses in the study did tend to drink wine rather than beer or hard alcohol.

From the press release:

Researchers evaluated alcohol consumption during middle age in 121, 700 participants in BWH’s Nurses’ Health Study using data from food frequency questionnaires. They included participants who were not heavier drinkers when middle-aged and examined the health status in the 13,984 women who lived to 70 years and over. Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Medicine/Science, Personal Health, aging, alcohol, brigham and women's
August 15, 2011 | 11:22 AM |

Why To Exercise Today: This Is The Body Your Future Self Inherits


When Stephen Burgay was in his forties, stress started to take its toll: High blood pressure, high cholesterol, the works.

Finally, his doctor sat him down and said: You know, what you do now determines the body you’ll have when you turn 50. Whether you’ll be healthy as you age depends on you. No more free rides. The body you have at 50 will be the body you inherit from the choices your current self makes.

These days, Steve, who is Boston University’s vice president for marketing and communications, is known to be reachable on the elliptical at 4:30 a.m. Like many of the exerciser species, he looks a good decade younger than he is. And he can’t imagine stopping — even on a drippy day like this. He writes: “However crazy it is to be working up a sweat before the sun rises (even behind cloud cover), it does mean that I get to start every day with a sense of accomplishment — and that’s pretty important, because I never know what’s going happen after I walk out the door.”

FILED UNDER: Personal Health, aging, fitness, why to exercise today