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_outlineReggie Tucker-Seeley, the Edward L. Schneider Chair in gerontology and an assistant professor at the USC Leonard Davis School is joined by his colleague, Jhumpka Gupta, an associate professor in the global and community health department at George Mason University. The two discuss issues of racism and hate and the implications for health across the life course.
Selected quotes:
Reggie Tucker-Seeley: "… with the COVID-19 global pandemic, we know that across racial and ethnic groups, that there is differential access to testing, different levels of access to quality healthcare, differences in the navigation of healthcare, differences and caregiving responsibilities, and differences and financial resources to navigate and manage healthcare and caregiving. And these differences have been shown across various health outcomes and almost always Black and indigenous people and other people of color generally fare worse than their white counterparts. Because we have seen this over and over for many health outcomes, many of us health disparities researchers, often state that we are so tired of still just describing the problem, but what does an intervention look like that addresses racism and hate towards Black and Brown people? That is, what this action and this space look like?"
Jhumka Gupta: "There are certainly is not a shortage of research describing health disparities, but what I would like to see more supported is the health benefits of explicitly addressing racism, whether that's specific anti-racist policy, or if we are talking about implicit bias training of healthcare professionals, how does that not only change attitudes, if at all, among healthcare workers, but how does this training translate into patient health outcomes? How does this training translate into reduced feelings of being in fight or flight among BiPOC and especially Black patients or on a campus community or a specific city?"
Reggie Tucker-Seeley: "I'm reminded of a quote that I've used several times related to when does our knowledge about health disparities move us to collective action. And it's a quote by Sir Jeffrey Vickers from an article he wrote in the New England Journal of medicine in 1958, he stated, 'The landmarks of political economic and social history are the moments when some condition passed from the category of the given to the category of the intolerable. I believe that the history of public health might well be written as a record of successful redefining of the unacceptable.' And I use this quote often. And I think the question is when will anti-Black sentiments in the US across our various systems from education to criminal justice to healthcare move from the tolerated to the unacceptable."
Jhumpka Ghupta: "We also know that these circumstances don't just happen randomly. They were purposefully shaped by decades and decades of policies, and they won't be remedied with a one shot or, or simple solution to address health disparities and systemic racism."
Reggie Tucker-Seeley: "My first recommendation and its related to the discussion that we are, we are indeed having in the field of public health, is not only to focus on differences across racial ethnic groups, or that is to think of race as a risk factor, but to think about racism as the risk factor - that is to think about not just group membership as being the risk factor, but the experiences of what group membership means as the risk factor."
Jhumpka Gupta: (On what prompted them to write their 2016 Huffington Post piece on racism as a public health issue): "We realized that these very critical issues were being discussed more and more in high profile spaces, such as the BET awards, but what was missing was the discussion of health implications. At the same time, it was a presidential election year and the hateful rhetoric of the Trump campaign was only getting worse. And the rhetoric was targeting Black communities, Black and Brown immigrants, refugees, women, and girls, and other communities such as LGBTQ, Muslim, and disabled communities. And for those of us who are trained in and do research in examining health inequities, we could just see the crisis coming. So we wrote the Huffington Post piece to number one, bring the public health lens into the conversation around social injustices by really laying out the decades of literature on how racism and discrimination impact health inequities and 2) to mobilize the public health field to not only study the etiological role of racism and producing patterns of health inequities, but also consider the need to respond to this hateful rhetoric in all spheres of life, outside of academia in our everyday lives."
Cited Works:
Huffington Post To Promote Public Health, Fight Hate Where We Live, Learn, Work, And Play
Health Affairs Asian Americans Facing High COVID-19 Case Fatality
TEDx “Experiencing Racism in VR”, Dr. Courtney Cogburn from Columbia University
medium.com “White Academia: Do Better. Higher education has a problem. It’s called White supremacy.” by Professor Jasmine Roberts, The Ohio State University.
“See No Stranger: A Memoir and Manifesto of Revolutionary Love” by Valerie Kaur