What can I do about this potbelly? How can I improve my sleep? Is this dementia? A physician sets out to provide ‘honest’ guidance on aging.
By Judith Graham in the Washington Post (thanks to T&T B.)
How many of us have wanted a reliable, evidence-based guide to aging that explains how bodies and minds change as we grow older and how to adapt to those differences?
Creating a work of this kind is challenging. For one thing, aging gradually alters people over decades, a long period shaped by individuals’ economic and social circumstances, their behaviors, their neighborhoods and other factors. Also, while people experience common physiological issues in later life, they don’t follow a well-charted, developmentally predetermined path.
“Predictable changes occur, but not necessarily at the same time or in the same sequence,” said physician Rosanne Leipzig, vice chair for education at the Brookdale Department of Geriatrics and Palliative Medicine at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York. “There’s no more heterogeneous a group than older people.”
I called Leipzig, 72, who works full time teaching medical residents and fellows and seeing patients, after reading her new book, “Honest Aging: An Insider’s Guide to the Second Half of Life.” It’s the most comprehensive examination of what to expect in later life I’ve come across in a dozen years covering aging.
Leipzig told me she had two goals in writing this guide: “To overcome all the negatives that are out there about growing older” and “to help people understand that there are lots of things that you can do to adapt to your new normal as you age and have an enjoyable, engaged, meaningful life.”
Why call it “Honest Aging”? “Because so much of what’s out there is dishonest, claiming to teach people how to age backwards,” Leipzig said. “I think it’s time we say, ‘This is it; this is who we are,’ and admit how lucky we are to have all these years of extra time.”
The doctor was referring to extraordinary gains in life expectancy achieved in the modern era. With advances in medicine and public health, people 60 and older now live far longer than was the case at the dawn of the 20th century.
Still, most of us lack a good understanding of what happens to our bodies during this extended period after middle age.
What questions do older adults tend to ask most often? Leipzig rattled off a list: What can I do about this potbelly? How can I improve my sleep? I’m having trouble remembering names; is this dementia? Do I really need that colonoscopy or mammogram? What should I do to get back into shape? Do I really need to stop driving?
Underlying these queries is a poor understanding of what’s normal in later life and the physical and mental alterations aging brings.
Can the stages of aging be broken down, roughly, by decade? No, said Leipzig, noting that people in their 60s and 70s vary significantly in health and functioning. Typically, predictable changes associated with aging “start to happen much more between the ages of 75 and 85,” she told me.
Here are a few of the age-related issues she highlights in her book: