WHEN YOU AGE
What REALLY happens when you age? Expert debunks five popular myths about sex and brain power
- Dana Rosenfeld is a reader in sociology based at Keele University, Staffordshire
- She says it's unsurprising that much of what we 'know' about ageing is untrue
- Over 65s make up a larger percentage of the global population than ever before
People over the age of 65 make up a larger percentage of the global population than ever before.
As this ageing of society only really took off in the last century, it's unsurprising that much of what we think we know about ageing is untrue.
The 'facts' about ageing depict people as becoming somehow less – less capable, less vibrant, less flexible, less sexual and less fulfilled.
But how many of these 'facts' hold up to scrutiny?
Here, in a piece for The Conversation, Dr Dana Rosenfeld, a reader in sociology based at Keele University, investigates five common beliefs.
As this ageing of society only really took off in the last century, it's unsurprising that much of what we think we know about ageing is untrue
Libido and sexual activity decrease
This is not true. Hormone levels change as we age, but this doesn't necessarily decrease libido. Indeed, for women, libido often increases after the menopause.
Older people's libido may be lowered by chronic illness (such as diabetes and heart disease), drug side effects (antihypertensive drugs, for example) and marital unhappiness and boredom.
So decreases in sexual desire in old age are often due to events and circumstances, not to physical changes that come with age.
Having a sexual partner, however, is the strongest factor for determining how often older people have sex.
Because women tend to marry older men, who die younger, older women's reduced sexual activity is largely due to widowhood.
Brain function decreases because of age
Not true. Our neurons work differently in older age, and older people can have difficulties with thinking and remembering.
But, as with sex, these abilities are strongly influenced by our social circumstances.
For example, mental abilities are closely linked to supportive social relationships and physical and mental activity.
Because we can change our social circumstances, we are likely able to offset the physical effects of ageing on our mental abilities.
We often treat young and middle-aged people's mental abilities as the gold standard, but this is biased and leads to false conclusions.
As we get older, we may think differently and at different speeds (we have more to remember), but this doesn't make our thinking less keen, deep, creative, productive or meaningful.
After all Peter Roget invented the thesaurus at 76 and Michelangelo drew up architectural plans for the Basilica of Saint Mary of the Angels and the Martyrs at 88.
You become more conservative
Not so. Imagine ten people: one aged ten, one 20, one 30 and so on.
The oldest is less liberal than the 60-year-old, who is less liberal than the 40-year-old, and so on.
You might conclude people get more conservative with age. But you'd be incorrectly assuming that each person started out with the same political outlook.
A 100-year-old woman, born in 1918, formed her baseline political opinions in a very different time.
Dr Rosenfeld said it was untrue that adults become more conservative as they grow older
What was liberal in the 1940s is conservative now (consider race relations, feminism and sexual norms).
What you're seeing is a 100-year-old whose political opinions have become less conservative, but remain more conservative than her children's or grandchildren's opinions, who began their lives on a more liberal footing.
This is what researchers in the US found in their study of political attitudes among different age groups over 30 years.
They concluded that 'change is as common among older adults as younger adults'.
Happily, this is untrue.
As a sociologist at the University of Chicago found, while happiness dips between the ages of 30 to 40, 'overall levels of happiness increase with age, net of other factors'.
Why? First, younger people may be exposed to stressful events that older, retired, people are protected from, such as dips in wages or periods of unemployment.
Second, the older we get, the more we tend to focus on positive memories and information, and the better we become at regulating our emotions.
And this upward trend continues until we're 'essentially dying'.
Your immune system weakens
It does, overall, but older people's immune systems vary enormously. Remember the 100-year-old who become more liberal over time?
She would have been 11 when the Great Depression began.
As a result, she would probably have undergone puberty while financially, socially and nutritionally stressed.
Poor nutrition would have weakened her immune system in the immediate and the longer term.
As researchers in France have found, being malnourished weakens the immune system, especially the very young and the very old, so if our 100-year-old woman was undernourished as an older woman, she'd be doubly disadvantaged on the immunity front.
But she might also be less likely to catch a cold. We become immune for years, and sometimes even for a lifetime, to a specific virus after we are infected with it.
Over time, we become immune to more and more viruses, so, the older we get, the fewer viruses can make use sick – assuming, of course, that we're not deluged by a mass of new viruses.
Again, it's how we connect – and have connected – with the outside world that shapes our older age.
Strokes: How to Save the Little Gray Cells
Health Editor’s Note: Having a stroke (big medical term for stroke is cerebral vascular accident, CVA) does not need to be the end of your world as you know it. What causes a stroke?, you ask. A stroke is simply not enough oxygenated blood reaching all of your brain cells, even the gray cells as the fictional, but quite enigmatic Agatha Christie character, Hercule Poirot, will point out as his most important, “able to solve mysteries” part. Oh, but let me get back to the reason for this article.
A decrease in oxygenated blood flow can be due to bleeding, when a blood vessel ruptures and blood flows into the brain tissue, or when a blood clot reaches an area too small to pass through and stops the flow of blood to any portion of the brain beyond that clot. This article mostly addresses “blood clot” causing strokes.
What are the symptoms of having a stroke? These symptoms may be noticed by those around you, before you will notice.
- You may be talking and suddenly whomever you are talking to will hear gibberish come out of your mouth.
- Your words will not make sense in the context of how you are speaking them.
- You may loose the ability to move your face, leg, arm, usually on one side of the body.
- You may not understand what others are saying to you.
- There may be a loss of vision in one or both eyes.
- You might feel dizzy.
- You may have trouble walking or loose balance or coordination.
- You may have a severe, sudden headache.
- When asked to stick your tongue out, your tongue may go to the right or left and not be centered as it exits the mouth.
An explanation of medical terms used in this article are in order. Thrombectomy is physical removal of the blood clot. Lysis means breaking down the clot, with a clot busting drug given by IV.
A stoke is a medical emergency and you need to be at the hospital ASAP. Now, as this article will point out, the time frame to assist you and to improve your chances of not having permanent disabilities brought on by brain tissue death, has become longer and that is a good thing…….Carol
Guidelines Extend Thrombectomy Window to 24 Hours
Comprehensive update from AHA/ASA also expands lytic criteria
by Crystal Phend, Senior Associate Editor, MedPage Today January 24, 2018
LOS ANGELES — In a radical move for the typically glacial pace of comprehensive guideline overhaul, the American Heart Association/American Stroke Association expanded the treatment window for endovascular thrombectomy within hours of release of supporting trial data.
The guideline, released here at the International Stroke Conference (ISC) and online in Stroke, moved from a 6-hour time frame for stent retriever use to up to 24 hours after patients with acute ischemic stroke were last known to be well.
The recommendation was class Ia for the period from 6 to 16 hours as both the DAWN trial and the DEFUSE 3 trial, released the same day here at ISC, confirmed better outcomes than medical therapy alone; it was a IIa recommendation out to 24 hours, reflecting that only a single trial for this window (DAWN) was available.
“This will be perhaps a once in a lifetime situation where a study gets published [and] within 2 hours is incorporated into new guidelines,” DEFUSE 3 presenter Gregory Albers, MD, of Stanford University in Stanford, California, said at a press conference. He noted that this was made possible by provision of an embargoed copy of the trial to the guideline-writing group.
The guidelines recommend physicians use either DAWN or DEFUSE 3 criteria for determining which large vessel occlusions are candidates for clot removal. DEFUSE 3 used broader inclusion characteristics (mainly in allowing a larger ischemic core and less severe strokes), with about 40% of participants not fitting DAWN criteria.
Basically, that comes down to being as generous as possible in inclusion to reach “anybody who is eligible based on either one” before the 16-hour window, but follow DAWN criteria from past 16 hours to 24 hours, guideline writing committee chair William Powers, MD, of the University of Chapel Hill in North Carolina, told MedPage Today at the press conference.
While Mark Alberts, MD, of Hartford HealthCare in Hartford, Connecticut, noted that his center had already adopted the 24-hour strategy based on DAWN, they will consider the two in resetting criteria. “Our stroke staff will meet and we’ll discuss them. I think that’s what’s going to go on in most systems; they’ll come up with a happy medium.”
That also necessitated a shift to the guidelines recommending more sophisticated imaging, specifically diffusion weighted MRI or MRI perfusion to aid in patient selection for mechanical thrombectomy.
In practical terms, these changes are likely to increase the thrombectomy-eligible population by 20% nationwide, commented Jeffrey Saver, MD, of the University of California Los Angeles.
“Now … it doesn’t matter where you are, there’s nowhere in the country that you can’t get to a [thrombectomy] center in 24 hours,” Albers noted.
However, “there’s a lot of work to be done,” toward the class Ia recommendation for development of regional systems of care that remained unchanged from the 2015 update, Powers noted. Each individual region has many issues to work out with “no easy recipe” that all can follow, he said.
Now adding the complexities of thrombectomy scans and transfers, “it’s a new world,” agreed Albers.
Thrombolytics, too, saw some changes in the guidelines. Overall, the recommendations for IV thrombolysis were broadened, with an increase in indications and reduction in absolute contraindications, such as recent dural puncture or non-major head trauma. Use in otherwise eligible patients with mild stroke even in 3 to 4.5 hour windows was also deemed reasonable.
Other changes included:
Prevention of deep vein thrombosis for immobile patients during the hospital stay should focus on intermittent pneumatic compression (upgraded to class I) instead of heparin, which was downgraded from a Ia to IIb recommendation
Candidates for carotid endarterectomy should be evaluated for that within 24 hours and surgery should occur within 7 days after
Acute blood pressure management recommendations got downgraded to reflect increasingly equivocal evidence of benefit
The guidelines were also endorsed by the American Association of Neurological Surgeons, Congress of Neurological Surgeons, and the Society for Academic Emergency Medicine.
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