Ken Dychtwald: The Changing Face of Retirement [audio]
[24 February 2006 - Motley Fool - NPR] The Motley Fool, February 24, 2006 � Beginning on Jan. 1, 2006, every 8 seconds, another North American baby boomer will be turning 60. That's about 11,000 each day and 4.5 million each year. So what will it mean for society? What will it mean for you? David Gardner talks about the changing face of retirement with Ken Dychtwald, author of The Power Years: A User's Guide to the Rest of Your Life. ...

Experts Find Keys to Healthy Brains for Aging Americans: National Institutes of Health moves forward on "healthy brain" project
[21 February 2006 - SeniorJournal.com] A panel of experts seeking ways aging Americans can keep their brains healthy, has zeroed in on education, cardiovascular health, physical activity, psychosocial factors and genetics as key factors associated with brain health as people age. In their report to the National Institutes of Health, they said research aimed at directly testing the effectiveness of interventions in several of these areas deserves further attention. The NIH is intensifying the search for strategies to preserve brain health as people grow older and the effort moved an important step forward today with a report by the expert panel. The report is published online today in Alzheimer's and Dementia: The Journal of the Alzheimer's Association. ...

Boomers are not aging gracefully
[22 February 2006 - The Brampton Guardian] Baby Boomers are in denial about their health, according to a new Heart and Stroke Foundation report. In the past 10 years, obesity rates among Boomers have soared by nearly 60 per cent. More than half of them don't exercise and 20 per cent of them smoke. Despite intense research and education campaigns, Canadians between the ages of 45 and 59 are in worse shape today than they were in 1996. "Baby Boomers, who should be the most educated, need to start getting off their seats," said Ottawa cardiologist Dr. Beth Abramson. "The numbers are staggering." ...

NIA Expands Arts Program Aimed at Debunking Negative Aging Stereotypes - National Institutes of Health (NIH)
[22 February 2006 - National Institute on Aging] Gail Brooks, 74, created a Japanese floral arrangement to express her feelings about the Vital Visionaries, an arts-based program developed by the National Institute on Aging (NIA), part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH). To represent the older participants, she included a Harry Lauder Walking Stick, a twisting shrub, because �like some of us, it�s gnarled but there's still plenty of life in it. The daisies symbolize the fresh attitudes of the medical students, and the variegated Aucuba leaves represent the mingling of the young students and us older people.�

The mingling of young and old is at the heart of the Vital Visionaries project, which is being expanded to help rout negative stereotypes of aging. The goal of the program is to improve future doctors� attitudes towards older people and to awaken in older people awareness of their creative possibilities. It is managed for NIA by the Society for the Arts in Healthcare, a Washington, D.C.-based non-profit corporation that promotes the incorporation of the arts in health care.

Major medical schools and museums involved as 2006 Vital Visionaries partners are:
* Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons and the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
* The Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine and the Mexican Fine Arts Center Museum in Chicago.
Washington University Medical School and the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis.
* The University of South Florida, Florida Center for Creative Aging, in Tampa and the Tampa Museum of Art and the Salvador Dali Museum in St. Petersburg.
* The University of Florida and the Samuel P. Harn Museum of Art in Gainesville.

In the spring and summer of 2006, the institutions will pair first-year medical students with healthy older people for a hands-on art journey at the museums. Before and after the four, two-hour art programs, the medical students and older participants will be asked about their attitudes towards aging.

�The Vital Visionaries is one of those rare programs where everyone has a lot of fun while achieving important goals,� said Judith A. Salerno, M.D., M.S., NIA deputy director. �Too often medical students only interact with ill and frail older people, so they may develop a skewed perspective. A first step towards improving care for older people is to improve how medical students see them.� In the 2004 pilot, medical students from Johns Hopkins School of Medicine experienced a significant improvement in their attitudes towards aging and older people.

The Vital Visionaries program is based on research that suggests medical students who interact with older people early in their medical training develop better attitudes towards aging. A University of Oklahoma study observed that �health care professionals tend to believe that most older individuals are frail and dependent and that those who are not are atypical� despite data showing that most elders are in good health and live in the community (Marie A. Bernard, M.D.).

The Vital Visionaries program was also based on Yale University studies that indicate older people who internalize negative stereotypes of old age suffer greater stress on their hearts and live fewer years (Becca Levy, Ph.D.). Preliminary results of research at the George Washington University now suggest a possible link between arts participation and wellness in older adults (Gene D. Cohen, M.D., Ph.D.).

This progressive program coincides with a decline in the number of physicians who specialize in medical problems associated with aging. Today, there are about 9,000 geriatricians in the United States, but an estimated 36,000 geriatricians will be needed by 2030 to treat the growing numbers of older people, according to a 2004 study contracted by the Association of Directors of Geriatric Academic Programs.

�The beauty of using art as a way to communicate with my partner Elaine [Rosenbloom, 76] is that we were both new to it so we could explore it together,� said Johns Hopkins medical student Cesar Briceno, 26. �I don�t know if I�m going to be a geriatrician but my attitude towards geriatrics has improved tremendously.�

- Overview of Vital Visionaries program
- Previous press release

What's Next? Boomer Business Summit Reveals Surprising New Research About How Boomers Shop, Use the Internet and What They Worry About Most
[25 February 2006 - PRWeb] Brand loyalty among Baby Boomers and older consumers is up for grabs, but the majority of marketers in Fortune 500 companies still believe this market is reluctant to switch or experiment with new brands. This is just one of the findings in a survey by Focalyst, a new research and advisory firm focused on the baby-boomer and older market. Focalyst's president, Mike Irwin, will be discussing the survey next month at the 2006 What�s Next? Boomer Business Summit in Anaheim, California. ...

Training Benefits Brains In Older People, Counters Aging Factors
[25 February 2006 - Science Daily] Too old to learn new skills? By golly, think again. New research at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign shows that training re-ignites key areas of the brain, offsetting some age-related declines and boosting performance. The findings, involving functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), provide the first visible evidence for a relationship between behavioral performance and cortical processors involved in dual-task processing, said Arthur F. Kramer, a professor of psychology and researcher at the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology. The study -- published online this month in advance of regular publication by the journal Neurobiology of Aging -- also adds to other emerging data that refute the idea that opposite brain areas become activated to help aging people compensate for a loss of cognition. Older studies, Kramer said, did not look at the impacts of training. ...

NIH Seeks Strategies to Preserve Brain Health: Suggests Promising Areas for Intervention
[21 February 2006 - National Institutes of Health (NIH)] With the rapid aging of the population, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) is intensifying the search for strategies to preserve brain health as people grow older. The effort moved an important step forward today with a report by an expert panel to the NIH, suggesting a number of promising avenues for maintaining or enhancing cognitive and emotional function. Specifically, the group said, education, cardiovascular health, physical activity, psychosocial factors and genetics appear to be associated with brain health with age, and research aimed at directly testing the effectiveness of interventions in several of these areas deserves further attention. The report is published online today in Alzheimer�s and Dementia: The Journal of the Alzheimer�s Association. It is a product of the Critical Evaluation Study Committee, a panel of experts appointed by NIH and led by Hugh Hendrie, M.B., Ch.B., D.Sc., of Indiana University, Indianapolis. The committee evaluated several large on-going studies of older adults for current scientific knowledge on brain health. ... Another major theme emphasized the interconnectedness between cognitive and emotional health. Cognitive health and emotional well-being are �inextricably linked,� the report concludes, and efforts should be made to examine them simultaneously. �Cognitive decline and emotional stress in older people involve a number of physiological and psychological processes going on at the same time,� says Thomas Insel, M.D., Director of NIMH. �This report highlights the need to better understand this interrelatedness if we are going to devise effective ways to maintain brain health.� The evaluation committee reviewed scientific data from 36 large, ongoing studies of aging and identified more than 40 separate factors that may play a role in cognitive and emotional health. Those highlighted in the report are summarized below, including those in which possible interventions might be explored:
Education � Higher levels of education correlate with both good cognitive and emotional function in the scientific literature. But there is no consensus as to why this may be so. Researchers continue to explore such explanations as education providing cognitive �reserve� or the socioeconomic factors such as quality of education that may affect the relationship between higher education and better cognition.
Psychosocial � A number of psychosocial factors � emotional and social support networks, high socio-economic status and low stress levels � correlate with cognitive and emotional health later in life. Stress, for example, has been linked to cognitive decline, while social engagement, social support and higher socio-economic status are associated with better cognitive and emotional health.
Depression and anxiety � Some studies associate a history of depression or anxiety with poor cognitive and emotional health later in life. Researchers only recently have recognized a possible connection between mood disorders and future cognitive decline. This could be an important area for testing interventions. ...

Mental Training Bestows Youthful Vigor on Aging Brains
[17 February 2006 - MedPage Today] With a little task-specific training, the brains of older individuals can blunt cognitive functional decline and start to look and act younger, researchers here said. Training for specific tasks not only improved performance in older people but caused increased activity in the ventral prefrontal cortex, a common site of age-related atrophy, reported Kirk I. Erickson, Ph.D., of the University of Illinois here. ... MedPage Today Action Points: Advise patients who ask that this study suggests that age-related cognitive decline may be reduced or reversed with task-specific training, although further studies will be needed before specific interventions can be recommended. ...

Nobel Laureate Eric Kandel to discuss the 'New Science of the Mind': Nobel Laureate Torsten Wiesel to introduce Kandel at Readers & Writers event on March 2
[17 February 2006 - New York Academy of Sciences - EurekAlert!] How did Eric Kandel, a native of Vienna who majored in history and later escaped from the Nazis become one of the world's most famous neuroscientists? How did his career evolve from early studies of reflexes in the lowly squid to the founding of a bioengineering firm whose work could some day develop treatments for Alzheimer's? How did his personal quest to understand learning and memory by studying four different disciplines - behaviorist psychology, cognitive psychology, neuroscience, and molecular biology -intersect with the emergence of a new science of the mind?
To discuss how his profound insights into thought, perception, action, recollection, and mental illness revolutionized our understanding of learning and memory, Nobel Laureate Eric Kandel will present a lecture, In Search of Memory: The Emergence of a New Science of Mind, based on his new book of the same title. The event, part of the Academy's "Readers & Writers" series highlighting important new science books, will be held on March 2 at the New York Academy of Sciences, 2 East 63rd Street. Dr. Kandel will describe how his personal and intellectual life influenced the course of his career and lead to groundbreaking research that culminated in the 2000 Nobel Prize for his work on the physiological basis of memory storage in neurons. His book begins with a recollection of his formative years in Vienna. Captivated by history and psychoanalysis, Kandel went on to study neurobiology and the biological processes of memory. His multifaceted perspective was the foundation for his path-breaking research that will continue to dominate modern thought--not only in science but in culture at large. Neuroscientist Thomas Jessell and Nobel Laureate Torsten N. Wiesel will introduce the author.
DATE: March 2, 2006 TIME: 6 to 7 p.m. PLACE: New York Academy of Science headquarters, 2 East 63rd St., New York, NY
###
ABOUT THE SPEAKERS: Eric Kandel is University Professor at Columbia University and a senior investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. He won the 2000 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine, which he shared with Arvid Carlsson and Paul Greengard. His other honors include the National Medal of Science, the Wolf Prize, the Gairdner International Award, the Charles A. Dana Award, and the Lasker Award. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Thomas Jessell is professor of biochemistry and molecular biophysics and a member of the Center for Neurobiology and Behavior at Columbia University Medical Center in New York City. He is also a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator.
Torsten Wiesel is director of the Shelby White and Leon Levy Center for Mind, Brain and Behavior and president emeritus of The Rockefeller University. He is also secretary general of the Human Frontier Science Program, president of the International Brain Research Organization, and chairman of the Board of the New York Academy of Sciences. Dr. Wiesel was co-recipient with David Hubel of the 1981 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.
Reception and book sale to follow.

Corporate Boards Call on the Expertise of Retired Executives
[9 February 2006 - New York Times] The last thing Martin Coyne II wanted to do after taking early retirement in 2003 from his job as executive vice president of the Kodak Corporation's photography division was to return to the 12-hour days and the stress of the corporate world. Yet, he was only 55, and he yearned to put his management expertise to good use without wearing himself out. Skip to next paragraph Jodi Hilton for The New York TimesMartin Coyne II, a retired Kodak executive, is a director for Akamai Technologies and two other companies. So he chose an increasingly popular alternative: a career as a professional corporate director at small or medium-size companies. Mr. Coyne was already on one board � the Akamai Technologies Corporation, based in Cambridge, Mass., with revenue in 2004 of $210 million. He has since joined the board of a second medium-size company and he is a senior adviser to two others. "When I started out, it was more to keep busy than anything else," Mr. Coyne says. "I wanted to keep my brain engaged. But I quickly discovered you can contribute more value to these boards than you could doing a full-time job." Corporate boards, especially at start-ups and small and medium-size businesses, are showing a growing appetite for activist directors like Mr. Coyne, who ran a $6.5 billion division at Kodak. The Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002, aimed at cleaning up corporate accounting in the wake of the Enron scandal, has put tremendous pressure on the boards of companies to uphold the highest standards of good governance. And who better to help guide those companies than experienced hands from the higher echelons of the corporate world? Retirees-turned-directors include several millionaires who left their full-time perches at Microsoft, Cisco Systems and eBay. ...