Category: aging

Calming Dementia Patients Without Powerful Drugs

  • May 29, 2015
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Diane Schoenfeld comes every Friday to the Chaparral House nursing home in Berkeley, Calif. to spend time with her aunt, Lillie Manger. “Hi Aunt Lill!” she says, squatting down next to her aunt’s wheelchair, meeting her at eye level. Manger is 97. She has straight white hair pulled back in a neat bun today. It’s tied with a green scarf, a stylish reminder of the dancer she used to be. Diane Schoenfeld, left, shows a family photo to her 97-year-old aunt, Lillie Manger. (Photo by Rachel Dornhelm/KQED) They go together to the dining room to look over family pictures. Manger needs to be reminded who is in them. Including one of herself. “That’s me?” she asks. “That’s you,” her niece confirms. “Am I

Diving Deeper into the Biochemistry of Muscle Aging

  • May 28, 2015
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If there is one sweeping generality to be made about cellular biochemistry, it is that everything is connected to everything else. No mechanism operates in isolation, and many areas of interest to aging research that have been studied point by point over the past few decades are all different aspects of the same larger system. This is becoming much more apparent in this age of powerful computers and advanced biotechnology: specialists can get more done with their time, and thus see more of the bigger picture within which their work rests. Today’s example involves muscle aging, the dynamics of muscle stem cell populations, the role of the immune system in regeneration, and the response of muscle cells to exercise and other stresses. These three are all fairly

Why the Older Americans Act is Important

  • May 28, 2015
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The Older Americans Act and Me After they both retired, my parents volunteered with Meals on Wheels, which delivers food to home-bound elders. Programs like Meals on Wheels have been supported through legislation like the Older Americans Act (OAA), a historic bill that was passed in 1965 to help all of us remain independent in our homes and communities as we age, but which has been overdue for reauthorization (the process by which Congress makes changes to laws over time) since 2011. Independence is something my friends and I think about a lot now that we are in our 50s and 60s, with many of us caring for our own parents, too. We talk about how we can remain independent in our homes for as long as possible—and

Top Scientists Outline Reasons to Eat More Protein

  • May 28, 2015
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Higher-protein diets based on sound nutrition and quality work on multiple levels. Leading nutrition researchers have outlined how protein improves appetite, manages a healthy body weight, reduces cardiovascular and metabolic risk factors, and increases dietary compliance in a recent review paper (1). In this overview of the literature, scientists from the U.S., Australia, and Denmark explored how diets based on properly dosed, high-quality protein sources, like those found in Isagenix products, improve health. Here’s what they found: Metabolic and Appetite Advantage Higher-protein diets have shown to successfully increase metabolism for the reason that 20 to 30 percent of protein consumed is used for metabolism and storage, whereas for carbohydrates it’s 5 to 10 percent, and for fat it’s only 0 to 3 percent (2). This

Inching Towards Treatments that Manipulate Heat Shock Protein Activity

  • May 28, 2015
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Heat shock proteins such as HSP70 are molecular chaperones involved in cellular housekeeping processes that clear out damaged or misfolded proteins. Their activity increases in response to heat, toxins, and various other forms of cellular stress, and dialing up the activity of heat shock proteins is involved in a number of methods demonstrated to slow aging in laboratory animals. There are a few programs underway in the research community aimed at producing therapies that increase heat shock protein activity, especially for neurodegenerative conditions involving protein aggregates, but nothing that has yet made the leap into later stages of development and higher levels of funding: Reducing the levels of toxic protein aggregates has become a focus of therapy for disorders like Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s diseases, as well as