From a New York Times online article:
“Our data indicate that there are no low-risk procedures among patients who are frail,” Dr. Hall and his co-authors concluded in their study.
Dr. Hall’s research, recently published in JAMA Surgery, has found that frail, older adults are more likely than other patients to die after even supposedly minor procedures — and even when the surgery goes well, without complications.
After operations, frail patients find it harder than others to regain strength and mobility, and to return to independent lives. Doctors and researchers assess frailty in a variety of ways. Geriatricians often measure things like gait and grip strength, and look for unintended weight loss and exhaustion.
To read more: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/13/health/frail-elderly-surgery.html
“Our work provides additional evidence that that diet matters,” Millen added. “From a public health standpoint, we can tell people that if you have early AMD, it is likely in your best interest to limit your intake of processed meat, fried food, refined grains, and high-fat dairy to preserve your vision over time.”
This cohort study included 146 152 individuals from the Prostate, Lung, Colorectal, and Ovarian Cancer Screening Trial and found that aspirin use 3 or more times per week was associated with reduced risk of all-cause, cancer, gastrointestinal cancer, and colorectal cancer mortality.
This systematic review and meta-analysis of 11 studies involving 21 517 physicians demonstrated an association between physician depressive symptoms and an increased risk for perceived medical errors (RR, 1.95; 95% CI, 1.63-2.33). We also found that the magnitude of the associations of physician depressive symptoms and perceived medical errors were relatively consistent across studies that assessed training and practicing physicians, providing additional evidence that physician depression has implications for the quality of care delivered by physicians at different career stages.
The annual rate of death from cardiovascular disease was nearly four times higher in women with poor, compared to good, exercise capacity (2.2% versus 0.6%). Annual cancer deaths were doubled in patients with poor, compared to good, exercise capacity (0.9% versus 0.4%). The annual rate of death from other causes was more than four times higher in those with poor, compared to good, exercise capacity (1.4% vs. 0.3%).
Ten-hour time-restricted eating (TRE) limits daily dietary intake to a consistent 10-h window, creating a 14-h nightly fast. Researchers studied whether TRE for 12 weeks in people with metabolic syndrome receiving standard medical care (including medications to lower cholesterol and blood pressure) improves markers of health. TRE led to weight loss, healthier body composition (including decreased waist circumference), lower blood pressure and levels of cardiovascular disease-promoting lipids (i.e., “bad cholesterol” levels), and more restful sleep. TRE could be an effective dietary intervention to help those with metabolic syndrome.
As societal stresses have increased, loneliness and social isolation have become silent killers. Dilip Jeste, MD, a geriatric neuropsychiatrist who specializes in successful aging, explains how loneliness has become an epidemic, the risk factors, helpful interventions, and how we can harness wisdom for compassion, self regulation, and more.
“Such wearable sweat sensors have the potential to rapidly, continuously, and noninvasively capture changes in health at molecular levels,” Gao says. “They could enable personalized monitoring, early diagnosis, and timely intervention.”
Gao’s work is focused on developing devices based on microfluidics, a name for technologies that manipulate tiny amounts of liquids, usually through channels less than a quarter of a millimeter in width. Microfluidics are ideal for an application of this sort because they minimize the influence of sweat evaporation and skin contamination on the sensing accuracy. As freshly supplied sweat flows through the microchannels, the device can make more accurate measurements of sweat and can capture temporal changes in concentrations.
Thus, while aging led to a pro-inflammatory profile within blood and muscle, lifelong exercise partially prevented this and generally preserved the acute inflammatory response to exercise seen in young exercising men. Lifelong exercise may positively impact muscle health throughout aging by promoting anti-inflammation in skeletal muscle.
Contrary to popular opinion, when it comes to well-being, our lives do not represent an inevitable decline from the sunny uplands of youth to the valley of death. Instead, the opposite is true — we can confidently look forward to old age as the happiest time of our lives.
So why do people grow happier as they age? Is it an absence of stress, or are they able to focus more on what brings them joy?
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