loader from loading.io

How air pollution, location and education impact aging

Lessons in Lifespan Health

Release Date: 06/18/2021

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...

info_outline
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...

info_outline
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...

info_outline
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...

info_outline
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...

info_outline
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...

info_outline
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...

info_outline
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...

info_outline
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,...

info_outline
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...

info_outline
 
More Episodes

Associate Professor of Gerontology and Sociology Jennifer Ailshire joins Professor George Shannon to discuss the impacts of air pollution, global aging and how factors like location and education can influence the way we age.

On the importance of place, or location, on aging

Well, I think of place as one of the greatest supports and constraints on the way that we want to live our lives. So we envision a life for ourselves, our daily decisions, but it's really dependent on where we live. So for instance, I have a goal to be a very physically fit person and to engage in physical activity every day because I know that's one of the best ways to support my own health and aging. But if I live in a place where there aren't a lot of opportunities for me to exercise outdoors, maybe because I don't have access to good park space or other recreational spaces, maybe because of weather problems, it's going to have a constraining power on my individual choices. So a lot of people really want to eat healthy and exercise. And some people live in places that provide a lot of opportunity for that. And other people live in places where actualizing those wishes, those  goals is really quite difficult. And then of course there are other factors about environments that really matter in terms of social stressors like crime or feeling safe in your neighborhood, and also more physical characteristics like, air pollution, which is one of the things that I've spent a lot of time studying while at the school of gerontology here at USC.

On air pollution and aging

We think of air as a physical characteristic. It's something that exists in the physical environment, but actually, maybe it's because I've been trained as a sociologist. I think of the air pollution as a social phenomenon because after all it's produced by humans for the most part. And so air pollution is located in places where we have a lot of industrial activity and where there's a lot of car traffic. So some people live in areas where they're closer to those sources of air pollution, and it usually is the case that those are lower income communities because throughout much of our kind of industrialized history in this country, people who could afford to live in a nicer area that was further away from sources of pollution would move and they would end up in a cleaner air environment. 

Now here in Los Angeles, we have poor air quality in a lot of places. On average, LA has worse air quality than a lot of cities in the rest of the United States, but there's also pockets of poor air quality here as well. So by the ports of Los Angeles and the ports of Long Beach, for instance, they have much worse air quality because a lot of that shipping and trucking activity, moving goods around. But living in California these days, particularly during fire season means that a lot of us are going to be exposed to poor air quality at some point during the year. And it doesn't at that point, it doesn't really matter what our own socioeconomic resources are. It's really just ways which way the wind blows and where the fires pop up around us.

Most of the research had been conducted in younger populations in children and adolescents and in younger adults, but just in the past 10 years, it's become really clear that older adults are a vulnerable population and that they're more likely to suffer adverse consequences from chronic exposure to air pollution, and also from these acute episodes. So we've done a lot of work trying to grow that area of research in public health air pollution topics. And I think that it has really caught on, and there are a lot more people who will have been working in this area, trying to understand the negative impacts of air pollution on older adults. Our group was most interested in the aging brain. And so most of my research has been in trying to understand how air pollution might impact cognitive aging, increasing risk of cognitive decline or risk of cognitive impairment or the onset of dementia, for instance.

I would say that until recently, although people understood that older adults were a vulnerable population, there wasn't necessarily a lot of direct attention on older adults themselves. So, those of us who work in this area of air pollution and its impact on health among older adults have been saying for a number of years that the federal regulatory standards that are used to regulate air quality,  which had been really successful actually at improving our air quality over the past few decades since these regulations were codified and put into action at state and local levels, they tend to be driven by empirical evidence over the entire life course. They don't necessarily focus on the evidence for older adults specifically. And the problem that we've seen with that is that we tend to find that there are adverse health impacts at lower levels of pollution for older adults than there are for younger adults.

 So I think that we need to have a louder voice as gerontologists, geriatricians, people who are focused on the other end of the life course, that we need to have more of a voice at the table when these conversations are occurring about how we should be improving air quality. And I think that the EPA and state and local organizations are really receptive to this idea because they also see the need for it and the importance of it. I've already noted in federal documents that they have been highlighting the need to focus more on older adults. But of course we need that expertise kind of among their ranks. So I'd like to see more partnerships between the environmental sciences side and the policymaker and programming side with gerontologists who are focused on this population.

On the protective role of education

The importance of education for healthy lives cannot be overstated. It is simply the most important factor in all of the research that we've conducted and the aging brain is certainly no exception. But actually we think education is particularly important for the brain because we think what happens is that in early life people develop a cognitive reserve or some people call it resilience, but essentially we're building capacity in the brain to be able to deal with insults that might occur later in life. So for instance, something like building up brain volume or neural connections and early life, which can happen in part through education is really important when an individual gets older and they have exposure to toxic chemicals, for instance, that might cross the blood-brain barrier or enter the brain through other means that having that underlying reserve or that ability to deal with these external threats to brain health is really important.

And people with higher levels of education seem to have a little bit more of that capacity. The other important thing about education though, is that it really sets people up for a lifetime of cognitive engagement. So people who have higher levels of education tend to engage in daily activities that are more likely to operate almost like a brain exercise, but it could be something as simple as playing instruments, speaking other languages and learning new things, taking classes later in life and, socializing with people, but anything that kind of keeps you sharp and keeps you on your feet is another good way to cope with the realities of some of the things that we're exposed to that might otherwise weaken the health of our brain.

On global aging and Colombia

I think if you ask most people, if you think of a place where there's aging happening, or there's a large population of older adults, where are those places? And they would say, think of countries like Japan, the United States, the United Kingdom, some of the countries in Western Europe, but aging is happening everywhere, everywhere, even in lower and middle income countries like Colombia that we didn't previously think of in terms of being an aging country. But Colombia, like a lot of countries in Latin America and other countries around the world, is experiencing a couple of key demographic changes like falling fertility rates and increased lifespan. And it's all happening very quickly. So Colombia will experience the same amount of aging in their population in about 20 years that the United States went through and, you know, in 50 plus years and some countries in Europe did and over a hundred year period. So this is a really opportune time to look at these countries that are undergoing this rapid transition to help us better understand aging. 

I also think that there is a potential to use the unique context of Colombia to help us gain insights, to help us understand aging in the United States population. So some of my colleagues in Colombia are working on a very famous study of genetics and Alzheimer's disease that are currently the home of one of the world's most important clinical trials of drugs and interventions for Alzheimer's disease at the moment. And it's because they have a cluster of people who are genetically predispositioned to get Alzheimer's disease at a very young age, in their forties and fifties. And so it's created this real world laboratory to understand a disease that we've just really been struggling to get a handle on. The discoveries made in Colombia will have far reaching impacts outside of that country, into the United States and other countries around the world, because we're all sort of dealing with this impending challenge of an increased number of people in the population who will have some form of dementia in their lifetime.