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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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...
info_outlineSean Curran, the Associate Dean of Research at the USC Leonard Davis School and an Associate Professor of Gerontology and Molecular and Computational Biology, joins Professor Geroge Shannon in a conversation about his research toward generating blueprints that can allow an individual to maximize health over the course of their lifespan. Informed by genetics, he is developing the capacity to predict which diets are ideal for a healthy life and which should be avoided.
Sean Curran quotes from this episode:
On the effect genetic makeup has with fad diets
“I think everybody knows somebody who's done a fad diet that had amazing results. And then similarly either tried that diet themselves or knows someone who did the exact same diet, only to find it didn't work at all. I would argue that those two diets or those two ways of changing what you eat probably had the same effect overall. But the reason that the results were different was because of the genetic makeup of the individual. So I think this is a new way of thinking about personalized medicine but taking it from a personalized diet standpoint, where rather than prescribing a one size fits all diet, looking at the genetic makeup of an individual and then one day being able to prescribe to them— here are the types of food that you should avoid and here are the types of food that you should increase consumption of on a daily basis.”
On the past research of diets and genetics for aging
“So I don't think anyone would argue that both diets and genetics play important roles in how our cells metabolize things and, and how healthy we are and how long we're gonna live. But in the past, the studies that had been done usually look at one specific mutation and in the context of one individual diet. So these are all traditional classical genetic studies. But what we found is actually that diet has a much more powerful role over the lifespan than we originally thought. We've actually found conditions where a diet can be used to mask a genetic mutation.”
On his research of worm’s diets
“A lot of studies have shown that worms can actually make a choice to pick one diet versus the other. But I think it's interesting what hasn't really been studied yet is whether or not worms make that decision based on the information that's given to them. Is this diet actually better for them? Is it nutritionally more readily available for them or does it just smell and taste better to them?”
On why food is hard to study with regard to aging
“So I would argue food is probably one of the most variable aspects of any individual's life compounded across differences and food that you made over the lifespan. Food and diet is integrated into our society on multiple levels. It's deeply rooted in what your personal tastes are. It's rooted in what your economic status is, what you have the availability to, to actually purchase in the market as well as cultural and family influences as well. So because of this, I think a lot of the research early on focused on changing sort of large factors in diet, particularly studies that either changed the amount of food that you're going to eat or when you were given access to the food.”
On how ‘yoyo’ dieting can be hard to keep up
“I think there's a lot of aspects of diet that make changing behavior complicated. One, the thought of depriving yourself of something, whether you really want it or not, I think perhaps has a psychological effect on a lot of people. I also believe that a lot of changes that you'll have to your diet work in the first couple of weeks. So I think the existence of what people think of as yoyo dieting is because when you exert a massive change on what your normal behavior is, your body is trying to adapt to this new and different types of nutrients that you're giving it. Because of that, you probably lose a little bit of weight in the first couple of weeks. After that, your body is used to using the types of nutrients, the types of foods, the amount of calories that you're giving it. It is adapted to the new diet you have.”