How to Live to 100
This is a kind of follow-up blogpost to The Longevity Quiz (what can I say. I just recently turned fifty and have been thinking about this subject)
Today I ran across an article from Health magazine.
Apparently those born after the year 2000 are more likely than ever to live to 100, according to research from Denmark. Good news for the kids, but what about us grown-ups?
Genetics do play a big factor in how long you live (thank you grandparents), but only somewhere between 20% and 50%, depending on the experts you ask. That still leaves over 50% up to YOU!
Walter Bortz II, MD, a clinical associate professor of medicine at Stanford, suggests how you can improve your odds of a long and happy life.
We can call this The Walter Bortz II, MD, Secrets to a Long Life:
Bulk up on fruits and veggies, +5 years (plant based whole foods diets reduce disease)
Exercise five days a week, +2 to +4 years (move and elevate your heart rate for a half-hour a day, minimum)
Reduce stress, up to +6 years (from meditation to music to movement to art therapy. Find something that work for you.
Get a hobby, +2 years (provides a sense of accomplishment.)
Floss, +6.4 years (removing harmful bacteria reduces stroke and heart attack risks.)
Vacation, +1 to +2 years (leisure is a great stress reliever!)
Sleep seven to eight hours nightly, +2 years (sleep assists cell repair.)
Have sex, +3 to +5 years (releases feel good hormones and burns about 200 calories, too!)
Thought you would like to know!
Revealing German Study on Runners and Lifestyle
A German study recently published in the latest issue of Deutsches Arzteblatt International reveals a link between lifestyle and exercise.
Sports scientists have revealed that impairments to health and physical performance are not primarily a result of aging but of bad lifestyle habits and lack of exercise.
Dieter Leyk and his team analyzed the stamina of more than 600, 000 marathon and half marathon runners and asked them about their lifestyle habits and their health.
Marathon running is particularly suitable for studying because participants have to put in sufficient training hours for the competition, and the athletes accommodate this into their day accordingly.
The scientists found that unfavorable characteristics such as obesity, smoking, and lack of physical activity were rare in runners, and reductions in physical performance were more likely to be the result of biological aging processes.
These reductions make their presence felt only after the 54th year of life and are but slight. More than 25 per cent of 50- to 69-year-olds had taken up running only in the preceding 5 years and participated in a marathon nonetheless. You can see this connection highlighted in the short video on oomphtv.com about the 94 year old runner Jack Kirk-The Dipsea Demon.
Something to think about when making your New Year’s resolution.
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Love is a Powerful Painkiller
Love is a powerful painkiller, study finds. I have always thought this, but now we have a study to examine.
Researchers say just a photo of one’s beloved activates the brain’s reward centers something like a drug might. Learning how to harness this could help relieve pain without drug induced side effects, scientists suggest.
The study, published online in the journal PLoS ONE, sprang from a meeting of minds between Arthur Aron of State University of New York at Stony Brook, a longtime researcher of the science of love, and Dr. Sean Mackey, a pain scientist at Stanford University. The two shared a hotel room while attending a neuroscience conference a few years back. Their epiphany came one evening over drinks. ”I’d had a couple glasses of Zinfandel and was chatting about pain and the brain systems involved and he was chatting about love and the brain systems involved,” Mackey said. “And we realized, you know, they could be influencing each other.” They knew that a few earlier studies had suggested that love relieved pain, but they wanted to go further and find out just what was happening in the brain.
They put out a call on the Stanford campus for people who were in the first nine months of a relationship and still in the throes of romantic passion.
”It was clearly the easiest study we’ve ever recruited for within hours we had these students banging on our doors saying, ‘We’re in love! We’re in love! Study us,’ “Mackey said.
Jarred Younger, then a Stanford graduate student, and the team tested 15 subjects. All were asked to bring in six photos: three of their beloved and three of a comparably attractive person they knew. The researchers heated the palms of the subjects’ left hands to a point that caused either a moderate or high degree of pain, at which point the subjects looked at a photo, either of their beloved or the acquaintance. In a third round of experiments, the researchers tested the effects of mere distraction, which is known to reduce pain, by having the subjects perform mental tasks (such as thinking of all sports that didn’t involve a ball) while their palms were heated.
The photo of the beloved and mental distraction appeared to reduce pain by about the same amount: 36% to 45% for moderate pain, and 12% to 13% for high pain. (The photo of the peer had no effect.) But when the scientists redid the experiment while scanning subjects’ brains with a functional MRI, they saw that the photo and the mental distraction task activated very different parts of the brain.
The distraction task engaged the higher, thinking parts of the brain. A photo of the beloved, on the other hand, engaged the more primitive, “reptilian” regions reward centers related to urges and cravings that are also implicated in addictions.
Learning how to harness the power of a loved one could help relieve pain without drug-induced side effects or perhaps help people quit smoking, the scientists suggested.
”Will I be going back to my patients and prescribing one passionate love affair every six months? I don’t know if I’m going there,” Mackey said. “But it tells us there’s a lot more to the experience of pain than just the injury.”
Bruce Naliboff, co-director of the UCLA Center for Neurovisceral Sciences & Women’s Health, said that the next step could be to separate out how much, if any, of the pain reduction was related to sexual desire.
”It’d be interesting to do an experiment with not just an acquaintance, but someone you feel close to just not a sexual attraction,” said Naliboff, who was not involved in the study.
That might include budding platonic relationships.
Like I said, I have always thought this, but now there is a study to examine. It would be interesting to see the results from a study of platonic relationships. oomphtv will certainly publish the results of their next study.
Walking can Help Memory and Cognitive Function
I just read this recent report that came out last week and it makes me want to put a walk/hike together for oomphTV.
Studies suggest that even short walks or hikes can make a big difference in your overall health. Walking can even help maintain memory and cognitive function for years, a study finds.
The research, published online Wednesday in the journal Neurology, is based on a study of 299 men and women, average age 78, who were followed for nine years. The study participants were asked about their physical activity, which was calculated as number of blocks walked per week (walking was the most common exercise). Study subjects walked from zero to 300 blocks over a one-week period. High-resolution brain scans were done on the participants nine years after the beginning of the study.
The more the participants walked at the beginning of the study, the greater their brain volume nine years later. This was still the case after researchers controlled for a number of factors, including age, gender, body mass index and education. How many blocks of walking per week did it take to see improvement? The magic number was 72, or about six to nine miles. Walking more than that didn’t further improve gray-matter volume. Although all participants were deemed cognitively normal at the beginning of the study, 40% developed cognitive impairment or dementia four years in.
However, those who walked the most reduced their risk of acquiring memory loss by half.
Lead author Kirk Erickson of the University of Pittsburgh said in a news release, “If regular exercise in midlife could improve brain health and improve thinking and memory in later life, it would be one more reason to make regular exercise in people of all ages a public health imperative.”
Those of you that are interested in putting together a hike in the Los Angeles area, perhaps in Griffith Park, please contact me david@oomphtv.com. If you don’t live in the Los Angeles area, perhaps you can contact some of your friends/neighbors and organize your own walk/hike.
Taking Early Retirement May Also Retire Your Memory
I am very proud of my mother for many reasons. Last year she started a new clothing and accessories business called “Green Buddha” (Check out the video called “The Green Buddha.”) with my sister. I have noticed it has given her a new boost of “oomph!” now that she has turned 80. A recent study suggests people like my mother have another reason why not to retire.
The two economists call their paper “Mental Retirement,” and their argument has intrigued behavioral researchers. Data from the United States, England and 11 other European countries suggest that the earlier people retire, the more quickly their memories decline.
The implication, the economists and others say, is that there really seems to be something to the “use it or lose it” notion. If people want to preserve their memories and reasoning abilities, they may have to keep active.
“It’s incredibly interesting and exciting,” said Laura L. Carstensen, director of the Center on Longevity at Stanford University. “It suggests that work actually provides an important component of the environment that keeps people functioning optimally.”
While not everyone is convinced by the new analysis, published recently in The Journal of Economic Perspectives, a number of leading researchers say the study is, at least, a tantalizing bit of evidence for a hypothesis that is widely believed but surprisingly difficult to demonstrate.
Researchers repeatedly find that retired people as a group tend to do less well on cognitive tests than people who are still working. But, they note, that could be because people whose memories and thinking skills are declining may be more likely to retire than people whose cognitive skills remain sharp.
And research has failed to support the premise that mastering things like memory exercises, crossword puzzles and games like Sudoku carry over into real life, improving overall functioning.
“If you do crossword puzzles, you get better at crossword puzzles,” said Lisa Berkman, director of the Center for Population and Development Studies at Harvard. “If you do Sudoku, you get better at Sudoku. You get better at one narrow task. But you don’t get better at cognitive behavior in life.”
The study was possible, explains one of its authors, Robert Willis, a professor of economics at the University of Michigan, because the National Institute on Aging began a large study in the United States nearly 20 years ago. Called the Health and Retirement Study, it surveys more than 22,000 Americans over age 50 every two years, and administers memory tests.
That led European countries to start their own surveys, using similar questions so the data would be comparable among countries. Now, Dr. Willis said, Japan and South Korea have begun administering the survey to their populations. China is planning to start doing a survey next year. And India and several countries in Latin America are starting preliminary work on their own surveys.
“This is a new approach that is only possible because of the development of comparable data sets around the world.” Dr. Willis said. The memory test looks at how well people can recall a list of 10 nouns immediately and 10 minutes after they heard them. A perfect score is 20, meaning all 10 were recalled each time. Those tests were chosen for the surveys because memory generally declines with age, and this decline is associated with diminished ability to think and reason.
People in the United States did best, with an average score of 11. Those in Denmark and England were close behind, with scores just above 10. In Italy, the average score was around 7, in France it was 8, and in Spain it was a little more than 6.
Examining the data from the various countries, Dr. Willis and his colleague Susann Rohwedder, associate director of the RAND Center for the Study of Aging in Santa Monica, Calif., noticed that there are large differences in the ages at which people retire.
In the United States, England and Denmark, where people retire later, 65 to 70 percent of men were still working when they were in their early 60s. In France and Italy, the figure is 10 to 20 percent, and in Spain it is 38 percent.
Economic incentives produce the large differences in retirement age, Dr. Rohwedder and Dr. Willis report. Countries with earlier retirement ages have tax policies, pension, disability and other measures that encourage people to leave the work force at younger ages.
The researchers find a straight-line relationship between the percentage of people in a country who are working at age 60 to 64 and their performance on memory tests. The longer people in a country keep working, the better, as a group, they do on the tests when they are in their early 60s.
The study cannot point to what aspect of work might help people retain their memories. Nor does it reveal whether different kinds of work might be associated with different effects on memory tests. And, as Dr. Berkman notes, it has nothing to say about the consequences of staying in a physically demanding job that might lead to disabilities. “There has to be an out for people who face physical disabilities if they continue,” she said.
And of course not all work is mentally stimulating. But, Dr. Willis said, work has other aspects that might be operating.
“There is evidence that social skills and personality skills — getting up in the morning, dealing with people, knowing the value of being prompt and trustworthy — are also important,” he said. “They go hand in hand with the work environment.”
But Hugh Hendrie, an emeritus psychology professor at Indiana University School of Medicine, is not convinced by the paper’s conclusions.
“It’s a nice approach, a very good study,” he said. But, he said, there are many differences among countries besides retirement ages. The correlations do not prove causation. They also, he added, do not prove that there is a clinical significance to the changes in scores on memory tests.
All true, said Richard Suzman, associate director for behavioral and social research at the National Institute on Aging. Nonetheless, he said, “it’s a strong finding; it’s a big effect.”
If work does help maintain cognitive functioning, it will be important to find out what aspect of work is doing that, Dr. Suzman said. “Is it the social engagement and interaction or the cognitive component of work, or is it the aerobic component of work?” he asked. “Or is it the absence of what happens when you retire, which could be increased TV watching?”
“It’s quite convincing, but it’s not the complete story,” Dr. Suzman said. “This is an opening shot. But it’s got to be followed up.”
