Using a computer may protect against memory loss late in life, as long as you also make sure to exercise, a new study suggests. 

In the study, which included older adults, computer use and exercise reduced the risk of memory loss, whereas doing either activity alone did not.

Participants who engaged in moderate physical activity (such as brisk walking) and used a computer were 64 percent less likely to have mild cognitive impairment compared with those who did not exercise and did not use a computer.

Mild cognitive impairment is a condition in which people experience noticeable declines in their cognitive function, including memory and language problems, but are still able to perform everyday activities.

"The aging of baby boomers is projected to lead to dramatic increases in the prevalence of dementia," said study researcher Dr. Yonas Geda, a physician scientist with Mayo Clinic in Arizona. "As frequent computer use has becoming increasingly common among all age groups, it is important to examine how it relates to aging and dementia."

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However, the study relied on participants to remember how often they had exercised or used a computer in the past year. More studies will be needed that follow people forward in time to confirm the results.

Computers and exercise
Some previous studies have found a link between exercise and a reduced risk of mild cognitive impairment (MCI), while others have linked cognitively stimulating activities, such as reading books, playing games or using a computer, and a reduced risk of mild cognitive impairment. But no studies have examined the combined effects of exercise and computer use.

Geda and his colleagues surveyed 926 people ages 70 to 93 living in Olmsted County, Minn. Participants were asked whether they had engaged in moderate physical activity, such as brisk walking, hiking, aerobics, strength training, yoga or weight lifting, in the past year, and how frequently they participated in the activities. They were also asked about the extent of their computer use.

Participants were examined by a physician to diagnose MCI.

Of the 205 study participants who did not exercise and did not use a computer, 41 (20 percent) showed signs of MCI. Of the 314 who both exercised and used a computer, 20 (6 percent) showed signs of MCI, the study found.

People who either used a computer or exercised experienced some protection against mild cognitive impairment, compared with people who did neither activity, but that finding could have been due to chance, the study said.

The results held even after the researchers took into account factors that could affect cognitive function, such as age, sex, education level, depression and the number of calories they ate in a day.

Protecting the brain
The researchers speculated that people who engage in both physical activity and computer use may be healthier, more disciplined individuals. In other words, these activities could simply be a marker for a healthy lifestyle.

It's also possible these activities benefit the brain directly. Exercise may increase production of growth factors that promote the survival of nerve cells. Computer use, and other mentally stimulating activities, may enhance connections in the brain, making it more resistant to damage, Geda said.

Because the study was conducted in one county, it's not clear whether the results can be generalized to the population as a whole. In addition, a sedentary lifestyle caused by too much computer use may predispose people to health problems, the researchers said.

The study is published in the May issue of the journal Mayo Clinic Proceedings.

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By Judith Graham
Kaiser Health News

Large numbers of seniors aren’t receiving recommended interventions that could help forestall medical problems and improve their health, according to a new survey from the John A. Hartford Foundation.

Notably, one-third of older adults said doctors didn’t review all their medications, even though problems with prescription and over-the-counter drugs are common among the elderly, leading to over 177,000 emergency room visits every year.

Falls cause over 2 million injuries in people age 65 and older annually, but more than two-thirds of the time doctors and nurses didn’t ask older patients whether they’d taken a tumble or provide advice about how to avoid tripping on carpets or slipping on the stairs, the Hartford poll found.

Similarly, depression can cause people to become socially isolated, suicidal, or stop taking care of themselves, but 62 percent of seniors said doctors and nurses hadn’t inquired about whether they were sad, depressed or anxious.

The results, which cover a period of 12 months, speak to doctors’ and nurses’ lack of training in geriatric medicine.  Providers need to recognize that “care of an 80 year old differs from that of a 50 year old,” said Dr. Rosanne Leipzig, professor of geriatrics at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York. But too often, this doesn’t happen.

Seven interventions examined in the Hartford study are part of Medicare’s annual wellness visit, which became a no-cost benefit available to all seniors in the government health program in January 2011.  Yet 54 percent of older people surveyed by the foundation had never heard of the Medicare wellness visit while another 14 percent weren’t sure if they had.

Only 2.3 million seniors out of a total 35 million with traditional Medicare coverage took advantage of wellness visits last year, according to government data.  Medicare pays doctors about three times their ordinary office visit rate for asking about older adults’ ability to function, evaluating their mood, recommending preventive services, and connecting them with community resources during wellness visits.

“These are low tech, low cost interventions that are easy to do and that can have a huge impact on an older person’s medical care and their quality of life and function.  But too many providers and older adults don’t realize they’re important,” said Dr. Sharon Brangman, chairwoman of the board of directors of the American Geriatrics Society and professor of medicine at SUNY Upstate Medical University.

Christopher Langston, program director at the Hartford Foundation, said older adults should schedule a Medicare wellness visit and talk to their doctors about recommended preventive care.  The Rand Corp. has found that only 30 percent of older adults get care supported by medical evidence, compared to 55 percent of the general population, he noted.

Still, despite gaps in care uncovered, 97 percent of respondents reported being satisfied with their primary care providers.

The mission of the Hartford Foundation is to improve the health of older adults.  Its survey, released Tuesday, asked 1,028 people age 65 and older between February 29 and March 3 about their experiences with care. The study was conducted online by Lake Research Partners and had a margin of error of +/- 3.1 percentage points.

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Seniors do just fine catching their zzzz's, a new study reports. In fact, compared to seniors over the age of 80, men between 18 and 24 are twice as likely to report sleeping problems.

Contrary to popular belief, healthy seniors have no problem getting a good night’s rest, a large new study shows.

In fact, researchers found that many seniors actually report better sleep than your average 20- and 30-somethings, according to the study published Thursday in the journal Sleep.

The bottom line is that sleep problems aren’t a part of normal aging and can be a sign of health problems,  said the study’s lead author Michael Grandner, a research associate at the Center for Sleep and Circadian Neurobiology at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania.

“This study shows that older people are not more likely to complain of sleep problems or daytime tiredness, relative to younger people, if you take demographics, socioeconomics, health, access to care, and depressed mood out of the equation,” Grandner said.

When an older person complains of sleep issues, it could be a sign of health issues, he said. "Sleep is a vital part of overall health, and ignoring sleep problems, especially in older people, is placing them at increased risk for poor health and outcomes down the road.”

Grandner and his colleagues questioned 155,877 randomly chosen adults in a phone survey that asked about sleep disturbances, daytime tiredness, as well as race, income, education, depressed mood, general health and date of last medical check-up.

To get a handle on how folks were sleeping, the researchers asked: “Over the last 2 weeks, how many days have you had trouble falling asleep or staying asleep or sleeping too much?” and “Over the last 2 weeks how many days have you felt tired or had little energy?”

When the researchers took health and depressed mood into account they found that people reported increasingly better sleep as they grew older – except for a brief decline in mid-life. That mid-life decline was worse for women than men. Grandner suspects menopause may be behind women's mid-life sleep issues but noted that since sleep started to worsen even before then, the stress of work and raising children may be partially to blame. "For men, workplace issues may also be a likely culprit, as that age is associated with peaks in heart disease risk, stress, and sleep apea," he said.

Compared to seniors over 80 years old, men between the ages of 18 and 24 were twice as likely to report problems sleeping. Among women the differences weren’t as large. Compared to seniors over 80, women between 18 and 24 were 1.61 times as likely to report problems sleeping.

This doesn’t prove that seniors are sleeping better, Grandner said. It’s just as likely that sleep problems bother them less. “In my mind, the most likely reason is that actual age-related changes in sleep don't consistently produce the level of discomfort as they would in a younger person,”

Beyond this, there just may be generational differences.

“The generation of people in that age range [seniors] may me more likely to take a stoic attitude towards symptoms,” Grandner said.

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Scientists may one day slow down aging with a simple injection of youthful stem cells. They’ve just proven this can be done in mice, according to a study published Tuesday in Nature Communications.

The mice, which had been engineered to mimic a human disease called progeria, would normally have grown old when they were quite young.  But that changed when researchers injected muscle stem cells from healthy young mice into the bellies of the quickly aging mice. Within days, the doddering and frail mice began to act like they were living the storyline of “The Strange Case of Benjamin Button” as they started looking and acting younger.

“It was mind boggling,” said study co-author Johnny Huard, a professor of orthopedic surgery at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine. “When I saw them I thought, ‘Oh my God, I must have made a mistake and put the normal mice in the wrong cage.’ But they were indeed the mice we’d injected with the stem cells.”

Normal mice live about two years, Hoard explained. But mice with progeria age very quickly and die by the time they are 21 days old.  Somehow the muscle stem-cells from the younger mice managed to reverse that premature aging process – at least temporarily.

The stem-cell injected mice didn’t live as long as normal mice, but they did survive about three times as long as would have without the treatment. Huard suspects if he re-injected the mice they would live even longer.

Huard and his colleagues aren’t exactly sure what’s happening, but they’ve got some theories. Scientists have discovered that we grow frail when our stem cells age and lose the ability to self-repair. These “tired stem cells” divide slowly, Huard explained.

He and his colleagues suspect the same thing happens, just more quickly, in mice and people with progeria.

“People with progeria look like they are in their 80s when they are 20 years old,” Huard said. “Their skin looks very wrinkled and old when they are very young.”

One of the biggest surprises for Huard and his colleagues was the impact on the brain from  muscle stem cells injected into the belly. Even though the cells didn’t get to the brain, they still improved its health.

“The number of blood vessels in the brains of progeria mice are significantly reduced,” Huard said. “But when you inject stem cells from a normal mouse into the belly of the progeria mouse, the number of blood vessels increases.”

That means that the normal stem cells must be releasing some kind of protein that spurs the growth of healthy cells, Huard said.

Huard can the big implications of his research.

“There’s a lot of money being spent in the world trying to delay aging,” he said. “It would be fantastic if we can apply this to human beings. It’s a very simple approach.”

Huard can’t say how far in the future this might be, but his group has been using muscle stem cells to repair damaged hearts, bones, and cartilage.

One day it might be standard for people to stash away stem cells when they are young so they can use this fountain of youth elixir when they start aging, he said.

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Want to delay death? Pick up the pace of your walking, suggests a new study.

Seniors who walk briskly may be able to delay death, essentially outrunning the Grim Reaper, a new study suggests.

Australian researchers with a wry sense of humor say they have calculated the average walking speed of the specter of death -- and it’s about 2 miles per hour.

Walk faster than that and you may outrun the Grim Reaper, too, they argue in a new study published in the latest issue of the British Medical Journal.

"As none of the men in the study with walking speeds of [3 miles per hour] or greater had contact with Death, this would seem to be the Grim Reaper's most likely maximum speed; for those wishing to avoid their allotted fate this would be the advised walking speed,” the authors wrote.

The team of researchers, based at Concord Hospital in Sydney, followed more than 1,700 older men for five years, studying the walking speeds of those who died and those who didn’t.

The men were timed with a stopwatch as they walked about 20 feet at a normal pace. During the five years that the men were followed, 266 died. Overall, their pace was slower than that of those who survived, leading the researchers to determine that people need to walk at least 3 miles per hour if they want to outrun death.

Despite its tongue-in-cheek style, the report still sends a serious message: Slow walking can be a sign that death is nipping at your heels. 

Slow walking is probably both a marker for poor health and an alert that some things need to be changed to improve the health of a senior, said Dr. Anne Cappola, a gerontologist and a professor of medicine at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania.

Researchers are looking into the theory that you can get people to live longer if you can get them moving faster, Cappola said.  “People are trying things like resistance training and getting people to walk more,” she added. “That can be difficult when older people are living in confined living spaces or are afraid to go outside because of where they live.”

While other researchers have noticed that slower movers tend to die sooner, the approach of the humorous new study might spur more seniors to speed up their pace, Cappola said.

''People need to walk faster,” she said. “And if they’re doing it to outrun death that works just fine.”

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Shaun Best / Reuters file

Former president George W. Bush, shown with former president Bill Clinton in 2001, is significantly less grayer than in this 2009 photo, below, with President Barack Obama.

When presidents start to sprout gray hairs and look a little wrinkly around re-election time, people often blame the stresses of holding the office for causing accelerated aging. But a new study finds that the presidency isn't so hard on elected officials after all; in fact, presidents are likely to live longer than men born in the same year as them. 

Additionally, 23 of 34 U.S. presidents who have died of natural causes lived well beyond what would have been expected if they were aging twice as fast while president, as some doctors have asserted, said study researcher S. Jay Olshansky, a professor of public health at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Most likely, Olshansky said, the privilege of wealth, education and medical access lengthened these men's life spans.

"To me, it's a classic illustration of the benefits of socioeconomic status," Olshansky told LiveScience. "All but 10 of the presidents were college-educated, they were all wealthy, and they all had access to medical care."

Stress and aging
Olshansky, who researches health and longevity, became interested in the question of presidential aging when President Barack Obama turned 50 in August 2011. News reports were rife with pictures of the graying president next to snapshots from inauguration day, Olshansky said, and some doctors and psychologists told reporters that the stress of the job was aging Obama prematurely.

In fact, there is disagreement among experts whether presidential stress, or any stress, strongly affects the color of your tresses. Genetics plays a major role in graying hair, and most presidents are of an age when graying hair and wrinkling skin are common.

No one dies of wrinkles and gray hair, Olshansky said, but if presidents really age at double-speed during office, it should show in their longevity: For every day they sit as president, their life spans should be cut short by two days.

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As presidential birth, inauguration and death dates tend to be well-recorded, Olshansky had all the data he needed to see if presidents suffer from truncated life spans. He compared the life expectancies of all presidents who have died of natural causes with the life expectancies of same-age contemporaries, using data from the Social Security Administration and the Human Mortality Database. (Presidents who died by assassination were excluded, as their deaths were unrelated to aging.) For the 1800s, Olshansky used life expectancy data from France, because the U.S. did not keep reliable population records during that time.

Healthy living
The results revealed that presidents were no more likely to die young than men who were the same age on Inauguration Day. The average estimated life span of the average age-matched man between 1789 and the present was 73.3 years, Olshansky reports in the Dec. 7 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association. The 34 presidents lived to an average age of 73 years.

On the whole, Olshansky added, presidents had already won the life-span lottery by the time they were inaugurated. The average age of inauguration was about 55, and many male babies born on the same date as the presidents wouldn't have made it that far, especially early in the country's history. For example, Olshansky said, the average life span of the first eight presidents, from George Washington to Martin Van Buren, was 79.8 years. The life expectancy for the average man born in those presidents' birth years was under 40.

Once inaugurated, the presidents showed no evidence of a shortened life span compared with other men who had likewise survived the perilous years of youth. If presidents did, in fact, age at twice the normal rate while in office, their expected average life span would have been 68.1 years, Olshansky found. If that number were accurate, he said, you'd expect to see half of the presidents die before age 68 and the other half after. In reality, two-thirds of the presidents outlived that estimate.

Olshansky's study doesn't answer the question of whether presidents show the outward signs of aging faster than the average Joe, but he said most seem to be undergoing a perfectly natural process.

"If you take a picture of anyone in their mid-to-late 50s and then take a picture four to eight years later, they're all going to experience outward signs of aging," he said. "Presidents are just experiencing the same thing everyone else is experiencing. You know, join the club."

Either way, he said, his study reveals that presidents are relatively youthful where it counts.

"The outward signs of aging don't necessarily tell us much about the inward signs of aging," Olshansky said. "These individuals do, in fact, mostly live longer than you would have predicted."

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