Category: Aging

MEwens
The U.S. Preventive Services Task Force recommends women aged 65 and up be screened for osteoporosis, without saying exactly how often that should happen.
But new research offers some guidance, suggesting that women with a good bone density score may be able to wait 15 years before their next screening because they are unlikely […]

MEwens
The journal Science is out with its list of the ten most important scientific breakthroughs of the year, including several achievements from the world of health and medicine.
The publication’s top pick: a trial of 1,763 couples, almost all of them heterosexual, showing that giving antiretroviral drugs to people already infected by HIV reduced […]

MEwens
President Barack Obama at his inauguration in 2009 …
It sometimes seems possible to track a presidency by the accumulation of gray hairs on the commander in chief’s head.
Indeed, the Cleveland Clinic’s Michael Roizen has theorized that the stresses and burdens of the highest elected office in the U.S. are so great that the […]

Katherine Hobson
Physically fit older men and women show fewer age-related changes in their brains, new research shows, buttressing medical evidence that regular exercise can preserve key parts of the brain involved in attention and memory.
By analyzing aerobic fitness and neural differences, researchers at the University of Arizona found a clear relationship between exercise […]

MEwens
Slowing March of Age-Related Diseases in Mice: Research published in Nature demonstrates how scientists used a drug in mice to clear out old cells that had stopped dividing in order to delay or halt age-related deterioration in certain tissues, the WSJ reports. An author of the study tells the paper that if the […]

MEwens
Cervical-Cancer Screening Options: The United States Preventive Services Task Force is expected to recommend against routine screening for the human papillomavirus among women over 30 based on a just-published review of the evidence surrounding the screening test, the WSJ reports. The report also says that the widely used Pap test, administered every three […]

MEwens
Women in their mid-to-late 60s who break a hip are five times more likely to die within a year compared to women of the same age who didn’t break a hip.
This death rate, according to a study published in the latest Archives of Internal Medicine, is surprisingly higher than those seen among women in […]

MEwens
Flu Caplets Are Back: Johnson & Johnson has begun shipping Tylenol Cold & Flu Severe caplets to stores once again after the medication — like many other Tylenol products — was recalled due to production problems, the WSJ reports. The problems and subsequent recalls cost J&J $900 million in sales in 2010 and, […]

MEwens
More Diagnoses: New government stats show that the number of cases of attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder rose about 30% over a decade as awareness of the condition led to more diagnoses, the WSJ reports. Some 9% of kids were diagnosed with ADHD in 2007-2009, up from 6.9% in 1998-2000, but researchers said the increase likely […]

Katherine Hobson
Sibling centenarians Helen ‘Happy’ Reichert, 109, with her brother Irving Kahn, 105.
New York centenarians are the starting point for a nationwide effort to figure out the genetic and lifestyle elements contributing to long, healthy lives.
As our colleagues at the WSJ’s Metropolis blog report, geneticist Nir Barzilai, of the Albert Einstein College of […]