The Secrets of Successful Aging (Part 3)

What Science Tells Us About Growing Older -- And Staying Healthy By TARA PARKER-POPE Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL June 20, 2005

Part 3

The Price of Being Alone

One reason successful agers may be better at handling stress is that they tend to have a lot of social support. Successful agers are not loners. People who age well tend to be close to extended family and have a strong network of friends and social relationships. Marriage in particular protects men from the perils of aging. (Among women, it doesn't seem to matter if they are married or not, as long as they have
other close relationships.)

The importance of family life and social relationships on physical health has been shown consistently in both animal and human studies. For instance, in a series of rat studies, baby rats that were handled briefly in infancy produced fewer stress hormones in adulthood than rats that were neglected.

In primate studies, relationships also make a difference in the quality of old age. "One of the crappiest positions you can get late in life is to be an old baboon in a troupe where you were once a young baboon," says Dr. Sapolsky of Stanford. The reason: Baboons, particularly high-ranking ones, spend their lives terrorizing those with lower rankings. But rankings slide. Powerful baboons get old, and the young baboons they once terrorized eventually end up in a position to get revenge.

But there is one subset of male baboons that escapes the stress of old age. These are the animals that spent their middle age establishing close relationships with the females in the troupe. Late in life, these baboons get harassed just as much as any other baboon, but they stick around anyway, because they've got a network of nice, female baboons that keep them company, groom them and generally act as a buffer against what would otherwise be a miserable life.

"Connectedness in old age is enormously important," Dr. Sapolsky says.

The same thing that helps baboons age successfully also helps humans. Study after study has shown that relationships make an important difference in the ability to achieve old age. Even centenarians, who have pretty much outlived most everyone they know, have a history of strong social relationships.

Significantly, it isn't the practical support of relationships -- having somebody to cook for you, for instance, or drive you to a doctor's appointment -- that seems to make the most difference.

The MacArthur Foundation study, which evaluated 4,000 older people from Massachusetts, North Carolina and Connecticut, focused on the one-third of the group that had the highest mental and physical function at the outset. Researchers then followed up with them at three and eight years into the study. As it turned out, whether or not the study subjects had a high frequency of emotional support -- meaning they spoke and met often with family and friends -- was a powerful predictor of who in the group ended up improving their physical function over time. Having friends and family in your life increases the likelihood that you will get out more, keep moving and actually improve with age, rather than decline.

（此照片转载自爱生云鹤的Blog，谢谢）

八年来，他不分晴天雨天，不管刮风下雪，不论节日假日坚持每天早4时至7时，晚6时至7时刻苦炼功，持之以恒。 For 8 years, he practiced persistently everyday irrespective of whether rain or shine, windy or snowing, holidays or festive season from 4am to 7am and from 6pm to 7pm.

Think Happy Thoughts

Personality traits such as optimism, adaptability and a willingness to try new things also seem to be linked to better aging. This became apparent in the Nun Study, which for three decades has collected data from the School Sisters of Notre Dame living in Mankato, Minn., as well as elsewhere in the Midwest, East and South.

The study is important because extensive family, medical and social history from the nuns is available. The goal of the Nun Study is to determine the causes and prevention of Alzheimer's disease and other brain diseases, as well as the mental and physical disability associated with old age.

Among many notable findings has been a study of handwritten autobiographies from 180 nuns, who wrote them, on average, at the age of 22. The writings were scored for emotional content and compared with survival rates from the age of 75 to 95. What researchers noticed is that the nuns who wrote with the most positive attitude at a very young age were 2 times more likely to be alive in late life than the sisters
who came across with a more negative point of view at a young age.

What's notable about the Nun Study, is that so much in these women's lives is the same -- the food they eat, the quality of medical care they receive, the life they lead -- and that's why the differences are so striking. Consistently, the nuns who age well are those with distinct personality traits such as a sense of humor and adaptability. Many of these nuns still developed illnesses and health problems
associated with aging -- but those who aged the most successfully were those who adapted to each new challenge, including illness or disability.

"Everyone experiences normal day-to-day stress, and we all have the same physiological response in terms of higher blood pressure and higher stress hormones," says David Snowdon, the University of Kentucky neurology professor who founded the Nun Study. "But because of their positive outlook, our suspicion is that [the sisters who have aged well] can come back down to their baseline level quicker. They didn't
grind on their stress. They had their stress response, and they got over it."

Mental Decline

The Nun Study and others have also taught us that managing stress may be particularly important in staving off mental decline.

Consider what happens to the brain during times of stress. For about the first 30 minutes of a stressful event, the body boosts glucose delivery to the brain. The short-term effect of this is that senses are sharpened and memory is improved. But if the stress lasts longer, the body calculates that all that extra glucose is probably more urgently needed by muscles engaged in fighting or fleeing. And so, even if you are actually just sitting in a chair stressing out over a job deadline and you really want that extra brainpower, the body shifts gears anyway and stress hormones begin to inhibit glucose delivery to the brain.

The impact of this is readily apparent in the hippocampus, the part of the brain associated with memory and learning. Stress hormones not only inhibit the development of neurons in the hippocampus, but they kill neurons as well.

The end result of all this carnage is a smaller hippocampus. Notably, strokes, long-term depression and trauma can all shrink the hippocampus. And, as brain studies of the nuns after their deaths have shown, a smaller hippocampus is also a tell-tale signal of Alzheimer's disease.

This doesn't mean that everyone who experiences high stress will develop Alzheimer's or that every person with Alzheimer's developed the disease because of stress. But anyone who has faced the stress of a family illness, divorce or job crisis knows how mentally taxing such a life event can be. And based on the science, it's increasingly clear that the aging brain is not immune to the damaging effects of stress.


.........to be continued in the final part - Part 4

(from an e-mail we received)

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