In a country where senility and incontinence have become tropes of aging, at least for Hollywood and Madison Avenue, it's no wonder many people are stressed about the prospect of aging out of a younger, livelier in-group as we all must someday.
A Yale researcher says people who embrace those negative stereotypes may be putting themselves at greater risk of developing one of the most dreaded age-related diseases — Alzheimer's.
A recently published research study led by the Yale School of Public Health demonstrates that people who hold negative beliefs about aging are more likely to have brain changes associated with Alzheimer's disease.
The study, however, also suggests that avoiding negative beliefs about aging, (such as thinking that all elderly people are decrepit), could potentially offer a way to reduce the rapidly rising rate of Alzheimer's disease, a devastating neurodegenerative disorder that causes dementia in more than 5 million people in the United States.
According to the World Health Organization, Alzheimer's is the most common cause of dementia and contributes to 60 to 70 percent of the 47.5 million cases of dementia that exist worldwide.
The study led by Becca Levy, associate professor of public health and of psychology, is the first to link the brain changes related to Alzheimer's disease to a cultural-based psychosocial risk factor and not simply biological aging. The findings were published online in December in the journal Psychology and Aging.
"We believe it is the stress generated by the negative beliefs about aging that individuals sometimes internalize from society that can result in pathological brain changes," said Levy. "Although the findings are concerning, it is encouraging to realize that these negative beliefs about aging can be mitigated and positive beliefs about aging can be reinforced, so that the adverse impact is not inevitable."
The researchers found that people in the study who held more negative beliefs about aging had a greater decline in the volume of the hippocampus, a part of the brain that is critical to long-term memory formation and connecting emotions and the senses, including sounds and scents, to memory.
The hippocampus is a name derived from the Greek words hippos, or horse, and kampos, which means sea monster, because of its resemblance to a sea horse. The hippocampus is one of the first areas of the brain to show damage related to Alzheimer's.
Yale's researchers also found significantly greater numbers of two other brain abnormalities commonly associated with Alzheimer's among those holding more negative beliefs about aging: protein clusters or amyloid plaques between brain cells and neurofibrillary protein tangles.
The problem for those of us holding negative beliefs about aging is that we will eventually see ourselves through that lens and will be none too happy about it. The worry and anxiety, aka stress, that we'll experience trying to slip past our negative beliefs about the inevitable will prove to be little more than a waste of mental energy.
"We know these are taken in at a young age and are reinforced over time," Levy said of the negative stereotypes that over time can become part of a negative self-image. Please click here to continue reading.
As bleak as the news is about negative beliefs about aging can be there is a simple way to improve the picture. It really all depends on how you look at it.
"Bolstering the positive can have a beneficial impact," said Levy whose scientific interest in aging began in Japan, an industrialized nation that according to the World Health Organization had the highest overall life-expectancy average in the world in 2013 of 84 years. The United States was ranked 34th at 79 years.
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