Category — Health research

You know the conventional “wisdom” about the brain: As we get older, the brain shrinks. Brain cells die. And we don’t get any new ones. We get slower and foggier and more absent-minded. If we’re lucky. Even if we avoid full-on dementia, the “fact” is the brain deteriorates, and the best we can do is maybe slow down loss of function.

Nope.

The evolving science of aging has upturned much so-called conventional wisdom, and here, happily is yet another example.

Our brains are actually far more resilient than originally thought. While it may be true that we lose some neurons as we get older, neuroscientists have discovered that stem cells in the brain can replace some of those lost cells. In fact, the brain is remarkably resilient at repairing itself. And the brain is always able to learn and make new connections. Which means that we could actually enhance brain power as we age. What a thought.

How do we help our brains stay “youthful”? No, it’s not by repeatedly doing New York Times crossword puzzles. Here are some proven suggestions from two pioneers in what I think of as “the art of resilience” – both mind and body. One is a psychiatrist; the other a neuropsychologist:

MOVE. Physical activity enhances blood flow (to the brain as well as everywhere in the body). Physical activity can directly improve brain health, boost energy and improve mood

SLEEP. Quality sleep rests and recharges the brain. What is good, healthy sleep? I wrote about that here.

EAT WELL. Yes there are “brain foods.” I wrote about the MIND diet here. Read up and eat!

CULTIVATE CURIOSITY. Novelty boosts brain power. Routine deadens it. Do something new. Create adventures for yourself. Especially in mid-life.

EMBRACE OPTIMISM. Optimism is not looking at the world through rose-colored glasses. It is the belief that you have the ability to solve problems, meet challenges and influence the course of events. This is known as “self-efficacy,” and there is good evidence that it has significant effects on health and well-being (brain and body). And…get this, it can be learned. I write about this in chapter 12 of Counterclockwise.

STAY CONNECTED. Humans are social beings (well, writers not so much), and interacting with others, staying connected to the world, activates and enhances our brains. Generosity, compassion, empathy, philanthropy – a life lived fully and meaningfully is a joyful life — and a key to a youthful, invigorated, resilient brain.

The days are getting shorter; the night are getting cooler. Exhale into Fall. And consider paying some attention to that all-important activity we engage in every day, for more hours than we engage in any other single activity.

NO, folks, I do NOT mean sitting. Remember: Sitting is the new smoking. I have already ranted several times about this, and I know you all paid rapt attention and (like me) have significantly modified your rotten sedentary habits! What I mean here is SLEEPING. So many of us have trouble with this simple, restorative, proven health and wellness strategy. Fall, with its longer nights, is a great time to get back to good, health-enhancing sleep patterns.

So what IS good, healthy sleep?

To function best, you need to get eight hours.
Not really, There is no magic number, say the experts. The non-experts in my house agree. My husband luxuriates in 9 hours. I feel like the walking dead on those rare occasions I get 9 hours. Seven feels wonderful. I actually prefer 6 ½.

Really? But MORE sleep is healthier, isn’t it?
Nope. Some studies have found that people who slept more than 8 hours a night died younger than people who got between 6-8 hours. But does sleeping longer cause poor health or is it a symptom of it? This is not yet known. It could be that longer sleepers suffer from problems such as sleep apnea, depression or uncontrolled diabetes that make them spend more time in bed.

On the other hand, some people function perfectly on 4 hours of sleep, right?
Probably not. Legendary short sleepers (Bill Clinton, Madonna, Margaret Thatcher) don’t necessarily do better on less sleep. They’re just not aware of how sleepy they are! So say sleep researchers. In fact, too little sleep impairs performance, judgment and the ability to pay attention; weakens the immune system; is linked to a higher risk of heart problems; and contributes to weight gain. (The latter was a notable [surprise] finding from the Harvard Nurses’ Health Study.)

I wake up during the night…that’s bad, isn’t it?
No. It just might be your natural sleep cycle. Many animals sleep this way, and there are indications that our ancestors did, too. When 15 people in a National Institute of Mental Health study lived without artificial lights for a few weeks, they wound up sleeping three to five hours, waking up for one or two, then sleeping again for four or more hours — and they said they had never felt so rested. I regularly wake up once or twice a night – even when I don’t (stupidly) drink a 16 oz mug of tea at 10 pm.

Ha! I can make up for “lost” sleep during the weekend.
Ha! No you can’t! Bingeing on sleep on the weekend to compensate for skimpy weekday sleep— what Harvard sleep expert Robert Stickgold, Ph.D., calls “sleep bulimia” — upsets your circadian rhythms and makes it even harder to get refreshing sleep. The body loves and thrives on consistency. It’s best to rise around the same time every day, including weekends.

The older you get, the fewer hours of sleep you need.
No, ma’am. Although sleep patterns may change as we age – due not to age itself, by the way, but to health issues linked to unsuccessful aging — the amount of sleep we need generally does not. Older adults benefit from getting as much sleep as they normally got when they were in their 30s.

So get out the flannel sheets, throw open the windows, breath deep, sleep well, dream big.

Staying physically active is the cornerstone of counterclockwise living. To which you reply: Tell me something I don’t know.

Okay, I will.

It’s true that people like you and me who live physically active lives know the benefits we reap. And it’s true that researchers are constantly devising and conducting studies that show the extraordinary health and wellness benefits of physical activity. But it is also true that determining the precise, long-term effects of exercise is surprisingly difficult. Most large-scale exercise studies rely on questionnaires or interviews and medical records to establish the role of exercise.

But these studies, important as they are – I’ve referenced many of them on this blog and in my book — don’t actually prove that exercise causes health benefits, only that people who exercise are healthier than those who do not. To prove direct cause and effect, studies would have to be long-term, real-time, randomized, control-group trials comparing groups of physically active people with groups of sedentary folks. These kinds of studies are complicated, expensive and, even if executed flawlessly, can’t control for the volunteers’ genetics and backgrounds.

But… suppose you could study the health of identical twins, reared together in the same households, eating the same foods, learning the same habits, playing the same sports – who, in adulthood, diverged quite dramatically from one another in one respect: one twin maintained an active lifestyle; the other did not. You could, then, isolate the effects of physical activity on health because both nature (genetics) and nurture (upbringing) would be constants.

This is just what team of Finnish researchers has done.  They mined the FinnTwin database to find (male) pairs (now in their early to mid-30s) and invited them into the lab where they measured each man’s endurance, body composition and insulin sensitivity, and scanned their brains. The number of subjects studied was very small (how easy is it to find twin sets like this?), but the results were unmistakable and startling.

These genetically identical twins turned out to be very different from each other. The sedentary twin had lower endurance capacity, higher body fat percentage, and showed signs of insulin resistance. (The twins, even in adulthood, tended to have very similar diets, regardless of activity level, so food choices were unlikely to have contributed to health differences.) The active twin had significantly more gray matter than the sedentary twin, especially in areas of the brain involved in motor control and coordination.

And, to add to the gee-whiz factor: Presumably, all of these differences in the young men’s bodies and brains had developed during their few, brief years of divergent workouts. That’s how quickly exercising — or not — can affect health.

So I believe I have told you TWO things you did not know: There is a proven cause and effect link between exercise and health. And physical activity (or sedentary lifestyle) makes for significant health differences very, very quickly.

Now go out and take a spirited walk. I said: Now.

Biological age v chronological age. The actual, functional age of your body versus your birthdate. Yes, there is a versus here. These two ages are more often than not separated by years, sometime decades. One, the age you think you are because you were born in a certain year, is virtually meaningless to your health and well-being; the other, the real age of your body, determines vitality, energy and wellness. Chronological age happens to you; biological age you can control in important and life-altering ways. I’ve written about this here and here, and it is the empowering fact that underlies my book, Counterclockwise.

What I had read previously about this differential pace in aging was that it began around age 40, that the body up until then was pretty forgiving. After 40, the research said, was when the accumulated benefit – or harm – you were doing to your body started to show up in what are called “biomarkers.” Biomarkers are statistical measurements of real, functional age, like blood pressure, heart rate, bone density, lung capacity, etc. After age 40, and increasing at a faster pace onward, biomarkers reflected the good and bad decisions made about how we lived our lives.

Now comes the surprising news that this differential pace in aging begins at much much younger chronological age than we thought. In a fascinating and meticulously configured study of 1000 young people tracked form birth to age 38, a team of researchers (Duke, UCLA, Kings College, Hebrew University) discovered significant differences in biological aging in this youthful population. When the researchers measured 10 different biomarkers at the end of the study, they found that the biological age of this study group, all of whom were chronologically 38, ranged from (biological) age 28 to 61. Yes, you read that right. Some 38 year olds were functionally 28; others were nearing retirement.

The researchers then measured the pace of aging based on repeated assessments of a panel of 18 biomarkers and found that some members of the study group aged near zero percent during some chronological years, while others gained three biological years for each chronological year.

This is really important stuff, you guys. So listen up. This is not just more proof that what we do and don’t do in our lives has far more impact on our health than the mere passage of time (or our genetic inheritance). It is powerful evidence that the process of aging well begins the moment we are born.

I love it when science “proves” what we all know already – in this case that a walk in the park (or any quiet, green natural environment) makes you feel good.

But, to give the Stanford University researchers who came to this conclusion their due, there’s more to the story that that.

For example: They figured out how to measure the subjective sense of “feeling good.” It turns out that a particular part of the brain known as the subgenual prefrontal cortex shows increased activity during what cognitive scientists like to call “morbid rumination.” (The rest of us call this grumbling to ourselves and rehashing all the ways our lives suck.) When this part of our brain is less active, we are happier. We “feel good.”

And this interesting finding: It’s not the invigorating physical effect of walking that makes you “feel good” – that is, have decreased activity in the morbid rumination section of the brain. Research subjects who walked along a traffic-clogged street did not get the same neurological advantages and mood elevation as the park walkers.

Here are the details: Researchers gathered 38 healthy, adult city dwellers and asked them to complete a questionnaire to determine their normal level of morbid rumination. The researchers also checked for brain activity in each volunteer’s subgenual prefrontal cortex, using scans that track blood flow through the brain. (Greater blood flow to parts of the brain usually signals more activity in those areas.) Then the scientists randomly assigned half of the volunteers to walk for 90 minutes through a leafy, quiet, parklike portion of the Stanford campus or next to a loud, hectic, multi-lane highway in Palo Alto. The volunteers were not allowed to have companions or listen to music. They were allowed to walk at their own pace. Immediately after completing their walks, the volunteers returned to the lab and repeated both the questionnaire and the brain scan.

For the highway walkers, the blood flow to their subgenual prefrontal cortex was still high and their broodiness scores were unchanged. But the volunteers who had strolled along the quiet, tree-lined paths showed meaningful improvements in their mental health, according to their scores on the questionnaire. They also had less blood flow to the subgenual prefrontal cortex. That portion of their brains were quieter.

This little study joins a growing body of research investigating the effects of urban living. Various studies have found that urban dwellers with little access to green spaces have a higher incidence of psychological problems than people living near parks and that city dwellers who visit natural environments have lower levels of stress hormones immediately afterward than people who have not recently been outside.

It’s not only how you live but where you live.

What’s good news for mice is sometimes good news for (wo)men: So listen up.

Australian and Chinese researchers have made what could be a ground-breaking discovery about one of the mechanisms of Alzheimer’s disease. Using mice – genomically so similar to us that it’s kind of scary – the scientists manipulated a receptor  that mediates the toxicity of nerve-damaging signals in the Alzheimer’s brain. In doing so they – hold onto your hats — reversed “behavioral deficits and Alzheimer’s Disease-type pathologies.” You could say, if you wanted to be dramatic about it, that they cured Alzheimer’s. In mice.

Here is my Science for Dummies explanation of what these guys did: We all (mice and [wo]men) have this good receptor that protects our brain from nerve damage and the resulting cell death and amyloid plaque build-up that are hallmarks of Alzheimer’s. But we also have a bad receptor that causes nerve damage, which results in, yes, cell death and amyloid build-up. The researchers discovered that, in the Alzheimer’s brain, the bad receptor is winning. When they genetically manipulated the mice’s brains to enhance the good receptor and jazz up (that’s science talk) its protective action, they saw the reversal of amyloid build up and cell death.

Sometimes we get very excited about research that looks ultra promising in mouse models (resveratrol is a great example) only to discover that humans are different enough that the research doesn’t easily transfer. I don’t think we start screaming from the rooftops, “We have cured Alzheimer’s.” The shout-from-the-rooftops breakthrough is the sophisticated way we are coming to understand how the healthy (and the diseased) brain works. What these scientists are discovering about the complex role of various neurotransmitters is very good news.

Meanwhile, we humans are deeply deeply indebted to the lab animals that make research like this possible. Mice and rats account for about 95 percent of all lab animals, and they have been integral to medical breakthroughs in aging, and in cancer and many other diseases. I know there are those who are against using animals in medical research, and my heart is with them. My head, though, acknowledges the leaps in understanding and the resulting amelioration of pain and illness that these little guys have made possible.

Is there – could there be – an anti-aging pill?

I write about the hope and hype of “anti-aging” – and by anti-aging, you know I mean prolonging (and enjoying) a healthy, vibrant, engaged and meaningful life for as long as possible. Most times there’s a whiff of hope and a shitload of hype. Most times there’s a sliver of interesting or provocative research that morphs overnight into products and treatments shilled by internet hucksters. Hope becomes hype in a heartbeat.

But this may be changing.

One of the big problems in the world of anti-aging – that is, the multi-billion dollar industry that has grown up around the evolving science of aging – is the lack of substantial, credible research. I am not talking about research that investigates how we age. That’s coming along nicely, and as you know from reading this blog, the news is very good. And I’m not talking about the research that explores connections between our bad habits (smoking, sedentary lifestyle, stress, diet) or our good habits (exercise, diet, sleep) and aging. We are getting excellent, thought-provoking data on that. Again, I’ve written about this quite a bit here.

I am talking about credible research on “remedies,” those substances (from HGH to CoQ-10, bio-identical hormones to resveratrol) hawked in books or on the web that promise to stop aging in its tracks, turn back the hands of time and cure what ails ya.

When you look for the research to back up the claims and promises, you don’t find it. The gold-standard studies (large scale, randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled) are not there. The reasons for this are interesting and complicated – too complicated to write about here. (I do, however, explain this in my book, Counterclockwise). But there is change in the air.

Doctors and scientists want drug regulators and research funding agencies to consider medicines that delay age-related disease as legitimate drugs. Such treatments have a physiological basis, researchers say, and could extend a person’s healthy years by slowing down the processes that underlie common diseases of aging — making them worthy of government approval. (And government – that is, FDA – approval depends on consistent evidence gleaned from large-scale, gold-standard studies.) Please know that I know that some horrific drugs have been approved by the FDA, and some potentially life-saving ones have not. This is not a perfect system.

The first drug scientists would like to subject to rigorous gold-standard research is metformin, which suppresses glucose production by the liver and increases sensitivity to insulin. The drug has been used for more than 60 years (in the treatment of diabetes). It is safe and prolongs healthy life and lifespan in worms and in some mouse strains. Data also suggest that it could delay heart disease, cancer, cognitive decline and death in people with diabetes. There are plans for a 5-7 year study involving several thousand people at 15 research centers around the country.

And who knows, in the next decade there might well be an anti-aging pill.

Let’s say, for some perverse reason, you wanted to organize your life to accelerate the aging process, to do everything you could to promote early chronic illness and set yourself up for low energy, foggy thinking, dark moods, disability, a night stand crammed with medicine bottles and, oh yeah, premature death.

Here’s what you would do: Get yourself incarcerated.

In prison you will eat poorly. (This, for example, is the Federal Bureau of Prison’s Certified Food menu offering for breakfast: “pkg grits, 3 slices bread, skim milk, 2 pkg jelly, 2 margarine.”) Ramen with crushed potato chips and mystery meat is purported to be dinner favorite.
You will have limited opportunities to be physically active.
You will have limited access to the outdoors (and none to nature).
You will live in a high-stress environment over which you have no control.
You will have limited, truncated or nonexistent relationships with family.
You will lack the opportunity to be alone (except if being punished).
You will have poor sleep hygiene.
You will lack meaningful work.

(Prior to this age-accelerating experience, you will have lived the first few decades of your life with little or no health care, and the chances are decent that you would have already significantly impaired your health with a substance abuse problem.)

People in prison are categorized by the system as “old” at age 50 – or sometimes 55. However old they are chronologically, research suggests that they are, due to incarceration, an average of 10 years older biologically. These “old” inmates suffer from the chronic conditions of unhealthy aging: arthritis, hypertension, ulcers, diabetes and heart disease. Also hep C, cancer, early dementia. According to research conducted by Jonathan Turley, a law professor and director of the Project for Older Prisoners, an “elderly” prisoner will experience an average of 3 chronic illnesses during his or her time behind bars. Not surprisingly, medical expenses for older prisoners are between 3 and 9 times higher than for other prisoners.

We know what ages us, what makes us sick, what robs us of vitality. Unlike those in prison, we are free to make good choices every day. What choices did you make today?

Aging is, at best – if we are lucky and if we work hard at it – a long slow decline, right?

Wrong.

Well, at least partially wrong. Consider this really interesting new study about the age at which the brain reaches peak performance. Researchers at Harvard and Mass General Center for Human Genetic Research looked at evidence from almost 50,000 online participants who had visited the website TestMyBrain.org and then tested close to 22,000 of those people (aged 10 to 71) on vocabulary, the ability to encode strings of numbers into symbols, working memory and something called the “mind in the eyes,” an emotion-recognition test which asks people to identify someone’s feelings using only a picture of that person’s eyes.

They found “considerable heterogeneity” in when cognitive abilities peak: Some abilities peak and begin to decline around the end of high school; some abilities plateau in early adulthood, beginning to decline in our 30s; others do not peak until 40s or later. On at least one important cognitive measure, researchers found almost no decline (in fact, an increase) with age. Their conclusion: “These findings motivate a nuanced theory of maturation and age-related decline.”

Yay for nuanced theory! We need more nuanced theory. We need to understand the many and varied ways in which the mere passage of time (chronological age) does not easily (or sometimes at all)correlate with the aging of the body (biological age). We need to stop thinking that the passage of years spells doom and disaster.

Athletes reach peak performance in their mid- to late 20s. Men’s sexual desire peaks at 30 (poor them). Geniuses often peak in their mid-40s. Our brains have different peaks depending on the tasks we ask of them and, I think it goes without saying, depending on how biologically youthful they are.

So, it turns out that our number-to-symbol coding abilities peak in our late teens. (But who needs that anyway?) Our working memory peaks (much earlier than you thought, I bet) between mid-20s and mid-30s. (So please, let’s 86-it on the “senior moments,” since 35 year olds can have those too.) Our ability to read emotion in faces doesn’t peak until almost 50, and then the decline is very slow, very gradual. In the study, vocabulary climbed with age and showed no signs of decline at all.

It’s time (past time) to stop expecting ourselves to fall apart as we age. We don’t. We don’t have to. This nuanced look at brain function is yet another example.

Whaaaaat?

Can there really be anti-aging and longevity benefits to indolence, inactivity and torpor?

What about all that extraordinary, highly credible evidence to the contrary? I’ve written extensively about the powerful and salubrious effects of physical (and mental and creative) activity. Exercise is “the only anti-aging regimen that actually works,” concluded the ground-breaking MacArthur Foundation Study of Successful Aging. “There is not single thing that will increase vitality at any age other than exercise,” said the renown scientists who head the USDA Human Nutrition Center on Aging at Tufts.

So this new study from Duke University is a shocker.

Okay, the research subjects were fat-tailed dwarf lemurs. But before you dismiss the results, you might want to keep this in mind: Lemurs are more closely related to humans than mice. And we jump on mice studies ALL the time. Case in point: resveratrol.

So about those lemurs. Smaller species almost always live much shorter lives than larger ones. Humans can live to 120. Lab mice don’t live much beyond their 3rd birthday. Now consider Jonas, a hamster-sized lemur, who died a few months ago just short of his 30th birthday. Yes, 3-0.

How did he do it? How did he (and his fat-tailed lemur compadres) live so long? And…more importantly, live such extraordinarily healthy lives? (Jonas’ clan staved off cataracts, apparently a big thing in lemur circles, and enjoyed more than double the number of reproductive years.)

The answer, my friends, is torpor. These long-lived, uber-healthy lemurs spend half a year (in the wild) and three months (in captivity) hibernating. Hibernating dwarf lemurs can reduce their heart rate from 200 to 8 beats per minute. Metabolism slows, breathing slows, and the animals’ internal thermostat shuts down.

Duke researchers think that torpor boosts health and increases longevity by protecting cells against the buildup of oxidative damage that is a normal by-product of breathing and metabolism.

“If your body is not ‘working full time’ metabolically-speaking, you will age more slowly and live longer,” said study co-author Marina Blanco.

The couch is calling my name.