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The future of aging

Lessons in Lifespan Health

Release Date: 01/23/2020

Conscious aging, redefining yourself and finding fulfillment as you age show art Conscious aging, redefining yourself and finding fulfillment as you age

Lessons in Lifespan Health

is an author, coach and teacher who leads a yoga class at the USC Leonard Davis School. He joined us to talk about his book, The Art of Conscious Aging and how to redefine yourself and find fulfillment as you age.  Transcript I hear all the time, I used to do yoga, but now my body doesn't like it. Well, find a new yoga class. If you remember how it made you feel, then doing it in a new way, maybe a gentler class, maybe a hot yoga class that's in the dark, that's slow, where you hold the poses and no one's looking at you because you may be self-conscious, maybe that's the...

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Studying how the brain’s blood vessels affect cognitive health show art Studying how the brain’s blood vessels affect cognitive health

Lessons in Lifespan Health

Dan Nation is a professor of gerontology and medicine at USC. His research focuses on vascular factors in the brain and how they affect memory decline and dementia in older adults. He joined us to talk about studying blood vessels in the brain to identify early signs of dementia and potential therapies to treat it. Transcript Speaker 1 (): The variability in your blood pressure day to day, month to month, year to year, and sometimes even beat to beat–the variability in your blood pressure is predictive of dementia risk. So higher levels of blood pressure variability are bad, even if you have...

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Deprescribing and medication management for older adults show art Deprescribing and medication management for older adults

Lessons in Lifespan Health

Michelle Keller is an assistant professor of gerontology and the Leonard and Sophie Davis Early Career Chair in Minority Aging at the USC Leonard Davis School. She spoke to us about her research focused on improving patient-clinician communication, medication management, and the identification of dementia in minority older adults. Here are highlights from our conversation. On polypharmacy “When it comes to older adults and medications, it's important to understand that while medications can be incredibly beneficial for treating various conditions, they can also present really unique risks in...

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Improving the health and well-being of family caregivers show art Improving the health and well-being of family caregivers

Lessons in Lifespan Health

Francesca Falzarano is an assistant professor of gerontology at the USC Leonard Davis School. Her research is inspired by her personal experience as a caregiver to her parents and explores how to improve the mental health and well-being of family caregivers, including through the use of technology. On young caregivers “I think right now it's estimated that five and a half million individuals are under the age of 18 are caring for a parent or some family member with chronic illness, mental health issues, dementia-related illnesses, and other age-related impairments. So, this is something...

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Aging among Black Americans show art Aging among Black Americans

Lessons in Lifespan Health

Lauren Brown is an assistant professor at the USC Leonard Davis School. Her research uses publicly available data to uncover the unique difficulties Black Americans face in maintaining physical and psychological well-being as they age. Her lab both challenges the methods used to study older Black adults and strives to increase diversity in data science research with the goal of increasing the visibility of Black and Brown people via data and storytelling. Quotes from the episode On the role of racism in biomedical and statistical sciences and disease prediction If you think about the...

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Using dance to ease Parkinson’s symptoms show art Using dance to ease Parkinson’s symptoms

Lessons in Lifespan Health

Patrick Corbin is an associate professor of practice at the USC Gloria Kaufman School and an internationally renowned dance artist whose career has spanned over 30 years and bridged the worlds of classical ballet, modern and contemporary dance. He recently spoke to us about his work, exploring the positive effects that dance can have on neurology. On movement and movement therapy Well, on a neurological level movement is cognition. Movement stimulates cognition.  So that's sort of the sciencey part. The other part is that dance is a multifaceted, multilingual way of movement, and...

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The effects of exercise on the brain show art The effects of exercise on the brain

Lessons in Lifespan Health

Connie Cortes is an assistant professor of gerontology at the USC Leonard Davis School. Her work straddles the fields of neuroscience and exercise medicine, and she recently spoke to us about her research seeking to understand what is behind the beneficial effects of exercise on the brain with the goal of developing what she calls “exercise in a pill” therapies for cognitive decline associated with aging and neurodegenerative diseases.  On brain plasticity and brain aging Brain plasticity we define as the ability of the brain to adapt to new conditions. And this can be mean...

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Tips for healthy aging show art Tips for healthy aging

Lessons in Lifespan Health

and instructional associate professor of gerontology at the USC Leonard Davis School, and a specialist in geriatric medicine, joins us for a conversation about healthy aging, including tips on how to keep the body and mind functioning for as long as possible. Quotes from this episode On the importance of setting small goals "People may have all the good intentions, but they might set up goals that are too ambitious and then when they don't reach that goal, they feel frustrated, and they quit… We have to let them understand that goals must be small…So, an apple a day. We have to eat the...

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Cellular balance across the lifespan show art Cellular balance across the lifespan

Lessons in Lifespan Health

Dion Dickman, associate professor of neuroscience and gerontology, joins George Shannon to discuss how the nervous system processes and stabilizes the transfer of information in healthy brains, aging brains and after injury or disease.  Quotes from the episode: On synaptic plasticity: “Synapses are essential, fundamental units of nervous system function and plasticity is this remarkable ability to change. And throughout early development into maturation and even into old age, synapses just have this amazing resilience to change and adapt to different situations and injury disease,...

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A balancing act: homestasis under stress show art A balancing act: homestasis under stress

Lessons in Lifespan Health

is a Distinguished Professor of gerontology, molecular and computational biology, and biochemistry and molecular medicine at USC. Over the course of his career, he has played a central role in defining the pathways and mechanisms by which the body is able to maintain balance under stress and in uncovering the role aging plays in disrupting this balancing act. He recently joined Professor George Shannon to discuss his research on how the body is able to maintain balance under stress and the implications it could have for preventing age-related disease and decline.   Quotes from this...

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Paul Irving, chairman of the Center for the Future of Aging at the Milken Institute and distinguished scholar in residence at the USC Leonard Davis School of Gerontology, joins Professor George Shannon in a conversation that sheds light on the need to prepare for growing older, reasons to resist retiring, the value of volunteering and other opportunities of aging.

Paul Irving quotes from this episode:

On the importance of planning and preparation

“This is the single thing that we all have in common, if we're lucky. We don't have race and gender and ethnicity and religion, but we all have aging. And yet, for some reason, this is something that people don't want to talk about as much as they should [and] don't want to prepare for. So, I think that for all of us who spend time thinking about this, [we should be] talking about it, communicating about it, [and] expressing that urgency. Not just for older adults, but for young people as well.”

On the value of volunteering    

“[It’s] not just that volunteering and service to youth is good for the beneficiaries, which is kind of intuitive. … The health benefits for the older volunteers are mind blowing. So the point is doing this work is not just good for the world. It's not just good for young people. It's good for your health. Every year, in addition to taking blood and doing all the other things that the doctor does when he or she pushes and prods and pokes, the doctor should say to you, ‘So, tell me about your volunteering,’ and maybe give you a prescription for a little bit more time with young people.”

On the benefits of employing intergenerational teams

“Older workers and younger workers bring different things to workplaces, different characteristics. The speed, the creativity and the risk-taking characteristics of youth; the balance, multi-sectoral problem solving and opportunity-creating understanding of age; and the understanding of how to navigate environments and get things done. There's some research that suggests that intergenerational teams, that mixed-age teams, actually outperform same age teams of any age. … I think that global employers are beginning to get it. It's beginning to happen in the United States.”

On the power of positive portrayals of aging                                                                                                     

“Older adults are as diverse as any other population with the same ups and downs. And I think Hollywood can play a really, really important role — and Madison Avenue too — in changing attitudes and, frankly, changing attitudes faster. I'll just add that I think things actually are moving. There's organic change going on now, and the only thing that concerns me is I think it's not going fast enough. So the question is, what can we do to catalyze it, accelerate it, [and] push it?”

On the business case for catering to older consumers                                                                                    

“Older adults make up a growing percentage of the population.. It's the market of the future. Get over the notion that older adults aren't consuming; get over the notion that older adults can't be attracted to travel and cars and clothes and food and all the rest. Enlightened executives in show business, advertising, etc. should be looking at that market and saying, ‘how do we produce more for this group?’”