In Brief

By Andy Humm

Keep That Blood Flowing to Beat Dementia

Dementia is a scourge of old age, and a new study has found that if you want to avoid it, one key is to make sure your doctor monitors blood flow to your brain and initiates prompt treatment if there is a problem.

Researchers at University Medical Center in Leiden, the Netherlands, compared brain scans of people over 75 with dementia and without it as well as scans of younger persons. "In our opinion," they wrote, "these observations strongly suggest that decreased cerebral blood flow indeed causes brain damage." The link has been hard to establish, the New York Times reports, and until now it has been thought that dementia might cause decreased blood flow to the brain and not the other way around.
 

Doctors Missing HIV Diagnoses in Older People

Even though AIDS has been around for a quarter century, doctors are still failing to spot it in many of their older patients, mistaking it for cancer or other diseases that invoke symptoms associated with the syndrome. And older people with HIV who fail to get on the drug-cocktail regimes that are extending life for so many of the infected have twice the risk of dying from an AIDS-related illness as younger patients, says the online journal, Clinical Infectious Diseases.

But there’s a double-whammy. The drugs used to treat HIV may have more toxic side effects on older people who already have heart or psychiatric problems. We just don’t know the extent of those effects because there are as yet so few studies on older people with HIV. Sounds as if it is time for aging boomers at risk to act up.
 

Hang in There, Pop

Economist Robert Samuelson, writing in the Washington Post, argues that mandatory retirement ages should be raised. Trouble is, “[the] system encourages earlier retirement among career workers and frustrates their reemployment. We could take steps to change this: review age discrimination laws to make it easier for companies to keep career workers; allow people to buy into Medicare at age 62 or 65 while still working.”

Michael Bazdarich, senior economist with UCLA Anderson Forecast, says older people may have “no alternative” but to work longer because there won’t be enough younger people to replace them.
 

Buy Stock in Older People

At the XIII Annual International Congress of the American Academy of Anti-Aging Medicine this past summer in Chicago, the focus was on scientific developments from “stem-cell therapeutics” to “maintenance of mental performance.” But A4M is also keenly aware of older people as a market. Data from the Harvard Business Review estimates that today’s “mature adults control more than $7 trillion in wealth in the United States” and “bring in $2 trillion in annual income.” The market for anti-aging products and services was put at more than $45 billion annually, set to rise to $72 billion in four years.
 

Relax, You’ll Live Longer

The above common-sense bit of advice is born out, CBS News reports, by a new study out of the University of California, San Francisco. The researchers looked at the effect of stress on women at the cellular and DNA levels. "To find something that goes to the heart of how cells age and find it so consistently related to stress, chronic stress, and bad stress, that's the thing that's so new and intriguing here," says Dr. Elizabeth Blackburn, a partner in the study. If the telomeres or tips at the ends of our DNA strands get frayed by stress, we age before our time. So take care of your telomeres and they’ll take care of you.
 

TV Audience Getting Older

The holy grail in TV advertising is the 18-to-34 year-old demographic. But that audience is shrinking, according to Nielsen Media Research, which is finding that American viewers are getting older overall – also “more ethnic, Southern, [and] Western.” While the South and West are growing the fastest, however, the biggest TV markets remain New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago.
 

Filling a Different Gap

The Gap clothing chain is known for catering to young adults and children. To reach a market that is too old for Abercrombie & Fitch and too young for Ann Taylor, the Gap folks have launched Forth & Towne, a new chain for “the new forgotten woman.”

Marshal Cohen, the chief analyst at NPD Group, told the New York Times: “Department stores had given up on [mature women] to chase after the youth market, and while 40 may be the new 20, these women want to dress differently,” – not like kids but not too matronly, either. A chain called Chico’s has already had some success along those lines.
 

Estate Tax Phase-Out Creating Shortfalls

Republicans have been very successful at branding the estate tax a “death tax” that threatens family farms. They’ve passed legislation that will lead to the eventual elimination of this tax. They want to make the phase-out permanent, even if it will cost the nation an estimated $100 billion annually.

The Democratic minority in Congress is fairly united in opposition to the phase-out, but the only thing that might actually slow it down is the fact that some Republicans like Senator Jon Kyl of Arizona are having a degree of remorse over the shortfall. He has proposed a modified version whereby the estate tax would be fixed to the capital-gains rate, itself down to 15 percent. But this, according to American Prospect, would only restore a fifth of the revenue lost by a total repeal. On the heels of Hurricane Katrina and the nation’s inability to prepare for it, prevent killer floods, or deal with the aftermath, a big part of the catastrophe lies in the funds lost by phase-out of the estate tax. Money stays in the hands of the rich, with less available for crucial public services.
 

It’s Not That You Can’t Remember, It’s That You Can’t Hear

As our hearing goes, so goes our memory, a new study says. Arthur Wingfield, a cognitive neuroscientist at Brandeis University, writes in Current Directions in Psychological Science, that what might seem “some age-related problem” like Alzheimer’s may really be “a sensory problem,” of hearing loss.

“With age, people lose the ability to hear some higher pitches and to discern sounds in rapid sequence, so they have to focus a lot of their brainpower on simply understanding the word. They are trying really hard,” he told U.S. News. As a result, “they don't focus on retaining the words in their memories.”

A third of Americans over 60 have hearing loss. Wingfield recommends speaking more slowly to friends and loved ones who are hearing impaired, and pausing between sentences to give ideas a chance to sink in, rather than “dragging out words.”

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