Practical, proven methods for staying healthy and active later in life.
Most of us think we know what aging means. Sore backs, sluggish brains, wobbly gaits, lonely hearts. And, true, the mind and body eventually do give out. But it doesn’t have to be all bad — there’s a lot we can do to live not just longer, but better.
Picture a graph. Instead of a long line sloping slowly downward — a miserable decline with increasing illness and injury along the way — envision one that stays high, up at the top of the graph. Only at the very end does this line drop down. Illness and disability, in other words, are compressed into a shorter period before death.
This is what scientists call “squaring the curve.” Put differently, it means that our “health span” — the years in which we are healthy and active — can last almost our entire lives. And that’s something that, to a significant extent, we can control.
Up to age 80 or so, longer life is mostly due not to genetics, but to environmental factors, including healthy behaviors such as physical activity, says Daniel Lieberman, chair of the department of human evolutionary biology at Harvard University.
Before modern medicine, Lieberman adds, “Life span was determined by health span. Our hunter-gatherer ancestors had to be active until they died. In turn, staying active turns on the processes that keep the body healthy.”
Steven Austad, a bio-gerontologist at the University of Alabama at Birmingham and senior scientific director of the American Federation for Aging Research, says: “As a species, we did a lot of physical activity for 300,000 years, until very recently.”
For us modern folk, the formula for maximizing our health span can be as straightforward as getting off the couch and walking or doing some other physical activity — you don’t even have to call it exercise — almost every day. It means eating right — more veggies, fewer doughnuts. Connecting with other people to keep loneliness at bay. And avoiding hazards like scatter rugs and cluttered hallways that lead to broken hips, and, all too often, shortened lives.
We now live in a world with growing numbers of old people, including people older than 100. So, what is accounting for longer lives?
Essentially, we have had a safer environment since the 1900s, with basic public health standards when it comes to such things as water, working conditions, refrigeration, and vaccinations, says Tom Perls, professor of medicine at Boston University and director of the New England Centenarian Study, the world’s largest ongoing study of people age 100 and older. Those factors have allowed more people to live past childhood illnesses and injuries into adulthood.
But making it to 100? Or 105? At that point, Perls says, it’s not good behavior so much as pure luck — in the form of genes. The centenarians he has studied all fit 27 genetic patterns. These genes slow aging and decrease the risk of age-related illnesses such as heart disease, stroke, cancer, diabetes, and dementia.
There may actually be an evolutionary advantage to having older folks around. Think about the resources that grandparents often provide — food, baby-sitting, college tuition — that can help family genes get passed down by supporting younger generations to reach reproductive age.
Then there’s the invaluable knowledge that older people bring to our communities. I saw this firsthand in 1993 when the Globe sent me to a Navajo reservation to report on a deadly outbreak of hantavirus — a group of viruses associated with rodents — rocking the Four Corners region of the Southwest. It was the tribal elders, speaking to researchers from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, who provided key information.
The elders remembered that earlier in the 20th century, they had observed increased rainfall, which led to more piñon nuts, which led to more deer mice, which led to more mouse poop, which aerosolized. Then, when inhaled, this toxic dust infected tribal members’ lungs.
Scientists have long known that exercise is crucial for protecting against heart disease, the leading killer of Americans.
A study published in 2008 by the European Journal of Cardiovascular Prevention and Rehabilitation found that physical activity reduced the risk of dying from heart disease by 35 percent, and the risk of dying of any cause by 33 percent.
Indeed, physical activity is “the single most important thing for healthy aging,” says Austad. “It doesn’t have to be sweat-dripping-in-the-eyes exercise. Any kind of physical activity helps.”
But what many do not know is that exercise is also the best thing you can do for your brain. It does two important things: It boosts cognition and elevates mood.
This is thanks to something known as brain-derived neurotrophic factor, a chemical dubbed “Miracle-Gro for the brain” by Dr. John Ratey, an associate professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. “BDNF is the magic factor, both in mood and cognition,” Ratey says. “Nothing protects the brain more than exercise. We make the most BDNF with exercise.”
According to Ratey, while games such as Wordle activate a small part of the brain, brain-derived neurotrophic factor activates more areas, including the hippocampus, the brain’s chief memory center, increasing the nerve cells there. A shrinking hippocampus is involved in both Alzheimer’s disease and major depressive disorder.
In July, researchers reported that when regular participants in cycling classes increased their workouts from one or two sessions a week to four, they saw significant increases in both cognition and mood.
Lack of exercise has been found to be a leading modifiable risk factor for preventing Alzheimer’s disease. According to a 2013 study by the Ontario Brain Institute, if everyone who is currently inactive were to change their lifestyle and become active, 1 in 7 cases of Alzheimer’s could be prevented.
And all it would take is moderate-intensity exercise, such as brisk walking, for 150 minutes a week — or 30 minutes a day for five days, according to the study. (If you’re still looking to bolster your brain, here’s an extra sweetener: chocolate. The biomolecules in chocolate have been found to boost cognition.)
Research also shows that physical activity can lift your mood. A meta-analysis conducted by an international team of researchers and published in 2016 showed that exercise has a significant effect on depression. Other researchers have found that a single session of aerobic exercise can improve mood.
Moreover, BDNF appears to be the link between antidepressant drugs and the brain changes that result in reduced depressive symptoms, a team of researchers from Sweden and Texas found.
BDNF, they noted, has consistently been highlighted as a “key player in antidepressant action.” Even just one infusion of BDNF into the brain is “sufficient to induce a relatively rapid and sustained antidepressant-like effect,” they said.
The bottom line, dare we say, is a no-brainer. As Ratey puts it, “Get outside and move. The best exercise is something that is fun and will have you coming back to do it.”
(Read the full article on Boston Globe)
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