Reinventing Aging: Baby Boomers and Civic Engagement
[June 2004 - The Harvard School of Public Health-MetLife Foundation Initiative on Retirement and Civic Engagement] The Harvard School of Public Health-MetLife Foundation Initiative on Retirement and Civic Engagement is sponsored by the Harvard School of Public Health's Center for Health Communication, and funded by a generous grant from MetLife Foundation. The Center is planning a national campaign, in collaboration with leading media and entertainment companies, to change public attitudes toward aging and motivate boomers and retirees to engage in community service. Numerous organizations involved in volunteerism, civic engagement, and aging are participating in this Initiative. (Download full PDF report)

Book Review: How Healthy Are We? A National Study of Well-Being at Midlife
[July 2004 - CDC's Preventing Chronic Disease] ... Overall, How Healthy Are We? answers the title question through research establishing midlife as a time when most adults have a positive view of physical health, have established supportive family relationships, are pleased with their financial situation, have a good quality of life, and have control and mastery of their work. Education, socioeconomic standing, race, and gender affect all of the above. How Healthy Are We? also can serve as a basis for brainstorming community-based approaches for tackling chronic health issues and for devising new methods to encourage behavioral change. For example, an awareness of gender differences in health-maintenance behavior, noted in Chapter 1, could change approaches to promoting weight loss or smoking cessation for men and women. Because the MIDUS survey included individuals aged 25�74, a more complete picture emerges on midlife in relation to the other life stages. How Healthy Are We? differs from other texts on midlife by presenting this expanded perspective. Some texts define midlife from a traditional psychological or biological perspective using staging or physical changes. Others take a health-management approach, focusing on specific aspects of midlife such as parenting or sexuality, or examining midlife in the context of larger societal trends such as divorce, two-income families, and longer life expectancy. ...

Brain aging found to start at 40: Genes can begin to fail early
[17 June 2004 - Harvard Gazette] Bruce Yankner, a professor of neurology at Harvard Medical School, is investigating how human brains change between ages 26 and 106. If you are more than 40 years old, the news may not be good. He and his colleagues at Children's Hospital in Boston and Harvard searched brain tissue from 30 people for changes in genes involved in learning and memory, and for damage to these genes caused by the normal stresses of living. From ages 26 to 40 years, their brains show similar patterns of wear and tear and low levels of gene damage. Brains 73 years and older exhibited more damage, as expected. A big surprise, however, came in the middle ages. Some people between 40 and 70 had gene patterns more like younger people, and some like older people. "In other words, people in their middle-age years show variable rates of brain aging," says Yankner, who is 50. ...

Arts help seniors age gracefully
[16 June 2004 - USA Today] ... Several members of this class are participating in a national study of aging and creativity that examines whether creative pursuits can benefit people 65 and older. In groups in San Francisco, New York and Washington, D.C., they sing, write or create visual art for at least an hour a week in programs taught by professional musicians, artists and writers. Then they perform or display their work. Researchers hoped participants would experience fewer health declines than seniors who didn't participate. And results from the first year of the Washington portion of the project, the first results in, have exceeded their expectations. Participants not only maintained their health, but they actually improved it, says project director Gene Cohen, director of the Center on Aging, Health & Humanities at George Washington University. ...

Being Downsized May Increase Stroke Risk
[16 June 2004 - Reuters Health] Losing a job is always tough, but for people nearing retirement age, it may also be harmful to their health, results of a new study suggest. People who lost a job close to retirement age were more than twice as likely to have a stroke as people of the same age who had not lost a job, researchers report. "Our study has established that, for workers nearing retirement, the loss of a job is a salient experience associated with negative effects on health, including increased risk of stroke," Dr. William T. Gallo at Yale University School of Medicine in New Haven, Connecticut, told Reuters Health. "The public, in particular older workers, physicians and occupational health care providers should be aware that involuntary unemployment in the years leading up to retirement may be a credible risk factor for adverse health events," Gallo said. This is not the first time that Gallo and his colleagues have found that job loss can have a negative impact on health. ...

Boomers! Forget retirement. Big business wants you
[11 June 2004 - Boston Globe] Yo! Baby boomers! Thinking about retirement? You may want to shift gears and start thinking about your next career move. U.S. retailers are taking notice of your work ethics and experience, and they want YOU. The people hammering home your worth are at AARP, the country's largest association for Americans 50 and older. AARP teamed up with the Home Depot chain in February to recruit older workers. It was the first national hiring partnership that AARP had established with any company. Now, the 35-million-member organization is joining forces with Toys R Us Inc. and drug store chain CVS Corp. to promote seasoned workers. "It just became evident that there was real interest from companies that wanted to connect with mature workers," said Emily Allen, AARP's assistant national director of the Senior Community Service Employment Program. ...

The real Reagan story? Aging society
[13 June 2004 - SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER] Last week's all-news TV channels (the cable stations that formerly carried news) missed the Reagan story I'm most interested in: I had quite enough of Ronald Reagan, the extraordinary; what about Ronald Reagan, the ordinary? Reagan the ordinary is the story about a 93-year-old man living with Alzheimer's disease for more than a decade. Reagan the ordinary is the story about families that must cope with intense medical demands. Reagan the ordinary is the extraordinary demographic trend that's changing America. Like so many older people these days, Reagan kept working long after the so-called "retirement" age; he worked a dozen years past age 65. He then retired to California where more than 400,000 people are older than 85. We are in an era when people live longer -- and that has many ramifications for the way we live, fund government and design our medical system. ...

Study: Baby boomer volunteerism could 'strengthen community life'
[15 June 2004 - USA TODAY] Some people look at the 77 million baby boomers and worry about all the medical and social resources they will need as they approach the traditional age of retirement. But a study to be released today by the Harvard School Of Public Health says boomers -- who are expected to live longer and healthier lives than their parents -- can become an unprecedented resource if they are mobilized across the nation as community volunteers. "There's a major opportunity on the near horizon to recruit large numbers of older boomers to help strengthen community life in America," says Jay Winsten of the Harvard School of Public Health. Winsten is director of the Harvard-MetLife Foundation Initiative on Retirement and Civic Engagement, whose report will be presented today in Washington, D.C. ...

'Imagination' helps older people remember to comply with medical advice
[4 June 2004 - NIH/National Institute on Aging] A healthy dose of "imagination" helps older people remember to take medications and follow other medical advice, according to a new study supported by the National Institute on Aging (NIA), a part of the National Institutes of Health. Researchers found older adults who spent a few minutes picturing how they would test their blood sugar were 50 percent more likely to actually do these tests on a regular basis than those who used other memory techniques. The findings by Linda Liu, Ph.D., of the University of Michigan, and Denise Park, Ph.D., of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, appear in the June 2004 issue of Psychology and Aging. The researchers are part of the CACHET Center at the University of Michigan and the Center for Healthy Minds at the University of Illinois. Both are NIA-supported Roybal Centers for Applied Gerontological Research, which focus on research of immediate clinical value. ...

Visualizing task aids memory, study finds
[13 June 2004 - Indianapolis Star] A healthy dose of "imagination" helps older people remember to take medications and follow other medical advice, according to a new study supported by the National Institute on Aging (NIA), a part of the National Institutes of Health. Researchers found that adults over 60 who spent a few minutes picturing how they would test their blood sugar were 50 percent more likely to actually do these tests regularly than those who used other memory techniques. The findings by Dr. Linda Liu, of the University of Michigan, and Dr. Denise Park, of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, appear in the June issue of Psychology and Aging. ...