Lifestyles that Promote Living Longer and Better

People in many parts of the world are living longer, due largely to improvements in medicine and healthier lifestyle afforded by less poverty. The downside is that the longer one lives the more likely a debilitating disease will emerge, such as cardiovascular disease, cancer, diabetes, or Alzheimer's Disease. For many people, the important thing is not how long they live, but how long they can live without serious physical suffering.

Many studies have established that the incidence of the common debilitating diseases can be reduced or delayed by modifiable lifestyle factors. While genes can obviously affect one’s vulnerability to disease, genes may not be the primary factor in how long or how well one lives. This is suggested, for example, by one study of over 110,000 healthcare professionals (about 1/3 male, 2/3 female) that clearly showed the value of healthy lifestyles.

The investigators queried these subjects and categorized them according to five lifestyle criteria:

•    Diet, as assessed using the Alternate Healthy Eating Index, with a score in the upper 40% indicating a healthy diet;

•    Smoking (never vs ever);

•    Moderate to vigorous physical activity (≥ 30 minutes/day);

•    No alcohol consumption above 15 g/day for women, 30 g/day for men;

•    Body mass index (18.5-24.9 kg/m²).

Women who met four of the five low-risk lifestyle factors lived 10 more years free of cancer, cardiovascular disease, and type 2 diabetes at 50 years than women who followed none of the low-risk factors. In men, the gain in disease-free life expectancy was near 8 years. In terms of total life expectancy, women in the low-risk group at age 50 showed an increase from 31.7 years to 41.1 and men increased their life span from 31.3 years to 39.4 years.

This large-scale study confirms what has been indicated by a host of earlier studies that healthy lifestyles involve proper diet, absence of smoking, low consumption of alcohol, substantial exercise, and a BMI in the range of 18.5-24.9 kg/m.²  Moreover, both women and men who have a healthy lifestyle have significantly more years in which they avoid crippling heart disease, cancer, and type 2 diabetes.

The largest impact was on reduced incidence of cardiovascular disease and diabetes in both women and men. The lifestyles that were most likely to increase the three major diseases were smoking and obesity, in both women and men. Perhaps beneficial effects would be magnified by more stringent healthy lifestyle criteria (for example, upper 10% of healthy diet or level of exercise).

Other posts on lifestyle and aging research have clearly identified other healthy factors, such as  the value of emotional well-being and reduced psychological stress. Anecdotes suggest that living a life of worthy purpose may also promote aging well and living longer, though apparently there is not much formal research on this possibility.

Though we have no direct control over our genes, most of us can largely control how we live our lives. The beneficial effects of healthy lifestyle on aging well and longevity surely include direct enhancement of organ function and indirect effects on gene expression. Healthy lifestyles will help you, as we say in Texas, "Go out with your boots on."

Source

Li, Yanping, et al. (2020). Healthy lifestyle and life expectancy free of cancer, cardiovascular disease, and type 2 diabetes: prospective cohort study, January 8, BMJ 2020; 368 doi: https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.l6669

Lifestyle Effects on Working Memory Ability

On multiple occasions, readers of my learning and memory blog posts asked me what they could do to improve their working memory. This is an important and very practical question. Working memory affects all aspects of life success: personal, educational, and professional. I usually tell them to practice attentiveness and concentration. But I probably should tell them to adapt a healthier lifestyle.

For over a decade a variety of studies have implicated lifestyle in memory function. A rigorous new study confirms these results. An Israeli research team studied 823 participants, aged 22-37 years, using brain scans taken during a difficult memory task, post-scan memory tests, and numerous measures of health and lifestyle. The brain scans identified the brain areas that particularly engage in working memory tasks, most important of which were the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, parietal cortex, and anterior cingulate cortex. These then served as a frame of reference to check for correlations with health and lifestyle.

The key finding was a strong correlation between activity in working-memory brain areas and health and lifestyle. With all behavior/health variables considered together, the highest positive correlation occurred, in order, with fluid intelligence, reading, spatial orientation, picture vocabulary, several memory tests, and attentiveness.  

They observed an opposite correlation for such specific life-style indicators as large body mass index and a variety of unwise lifestyles such as binge drinking, and regular smoking. Health variables that correlated negatively with working-memory brain areas included high body-mass index, high blood pressure, poor glucose regulation.

The healthy lifestyle variables also correlated with other cognitive functions, such as fluid intelligence, reading/language skills, visuospatial orientation, sustained attention, mental flexibility and emotional intelligence, and physical endurance. Thus, the working memory benefit from healthy lifestyles seems to reflect a general improvement of brain function that good health confers.

The principle confirmed here supports the underlying theme of my recent e-book for seniors, which explained how memory serves a function like a canary in the coal mine. Memory decline is a warning signal of a damaged brain. That book explains the healthy life styles that people should be using as they age in order to keep the brain healthy and prevent memory deterioration. Changing lifestyle after the damage has already occurred may be too late. The point is that young people with healthy lifestyles have better brain function, and those lifestyles will help both body and brain to age well.

I recently published a book, “To Tell the Truth: Save Us from Concealment, Half-truths, Misrepresentation, Spin, and Fake News.” It is an inexpensive ($3.99), e-book now available at Amazon. At Smashwords.com you can choose among several e-book formats, including pdf.

Sources:

Klemm, W. R. (2014). Improve Your Memory for a Healthy Brain. Memory Is the Canary in Your Brain's Coal Mine. https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/496252

Moser, D. A. et al. (2017). An integrated brain-behavior model for working memory. Molecular Psychiatry. Doi: 10.1038/mp.2017.247

Aging Shrinks the Brain

In most people, their brains get smaller as they age. It is not so much that neurons die but that their terminals and synaptic junctions shrivel. A known cause is the over-secretion of cortisol by stress, but perhaps there are also other age-related causes.

However, shrinkage with age is not inevitable. Certain people are "super-agers," defined as adults over 80 with memory at least as good as normal middle-aged adults. A usually reliable index for decline in memory ability is the degree of brain shrinkage, specifically cortical volume. Brain-scan studies show that super-agers have thicker layers of cortex than do others of the same age. Thus, their cortex has not shrunk as much as average elderly or they had more to start with. It is possible that something about the lifestyle of super-agers protected them from brain atrophy. It is not convenient to know how much cortical volume the elderly had in their youth. But the second option has been tested in a study that compared the rate of cortical aging in 36 adults averaging 83 years of age. The investigators recruited super-agers and normal elderly and tested them in an initial visit and again 18 months later. Before and after cognitive and memory tests and brain scans provided a basis for tracking the rate of aging.

Super-agers scored higher on cognitive and memory tests than the average group at both the beginning and end of the study period. This suggests that they may have been endowed with more mental capability when they were young. But it also indicates that super-agers are more resistant to age-induced mental decline. The two groups did not differ in any other neuropsychological measures, education, or estimated IQ.

A clear correlation occurred between the two groups and cortical volume. The average memory group had over twice as much cortical shrinkage over the 18 months as did the super-agers. Some in the average group lost as much as 3.4% of cortical volume per year. If that continued over the next 10 years, they would suffer a devastating loss of over 30% in cortical volume.

Unfortunately, the study did not examine the lifestyles in the two groups. The super-agers may have just had good genes or may have been more mentally active over their lifetime and had healthier diets, more exercise, and less stress than those in the average group. Notably, some shrinkage did occur in the super-agers, on average at a rate of 1.06% per year. They still scored as well as the average 50-year old on various cognitive and memory tests. It is possible that some shrinkage is a good thing, reflecting perhaps a pruning of neural circuitry as the brain learns and develops more efficiency. Pruning is a conspicuous phenomenon in the brains of the fetus and infants as maturation progresses. Obviously too much pruning can leave neural circuitry with insufficient resources.

These results also emphasize that age discrimination is not defensible. Each elderly person's mental competence has to be judged on its own merits, not on a negative stereotype of the elderly.

Sources:

Rogaalski,E. J. et al. (2013) Youthful memory capacity in old brains. J. Cognitive Neuroscience. 25(1), 29-36.

Cook, Amanda H. et al. (2017). Rates of cortical atrophy in adults 80 years and older with superior vs. average episodic memory. JAMA. 317(13), 1373-1375.

Improving Memory Involves More Than Gimmicks

Two elderly couples were enjoying friendly conversation when one of the men asked the other, "Fred, how was the memory clinic you went to last month?"

"Outstanding," Fred replied. "They taught us all the latest psychological techniques - visualization, association - it made a huge difference for me."

"That's great! What was the name of the clinic?"

Fred went blank. He thought and thought, but couldn't remember. Then Fred smiled and asked, "What do you call that red flower with the long stem and thorns?"

"You mean a rose?"

"Yes, that's it!" He turned to his wife. . ."Rose, what was the name of that clinic?"

Memory techniques, like visualized associations, are important for improving memory. I sometimes get chided, as in a recent commentary, for writing about things that readers think are unrelated to memory.

But memory is not independent of everything else that brains do. This includes general thinking abilities, motivation, attitudes, lifestyle, and the mental challenges that a person seeks. General health, exercise, sleep, response to stress, and diet are also important. I have elaborated on these influences on memory in my books and learning and memory blog. Research continually expands our understanding of these indirect influences on learning and memory, and I try to keep readers informed of the practical applications of these developments.

Another under-appreciated area about memory is the role of learning. As two sides of the same coin, learning and memory are interdependent. How we approach a learning task has enormous impact on how much of it we remember. These factors include study strategy, attentiveness, distractibility and cognitive interference, and organization and categorization of learning material. Likewise, how much you remember of learned material affects one’s capacity for understanding and memorizing new material. Experts in a given field have become experts because what they have memorized includes learning templates and schema that help them to be better learners than non-experts. They may have learned to increase working memory capacity, which in turn improves the ability to think and solve problems.  That is, the more they know, the more they can know.

Memory ability is multi-dimensional. The complete learner employs all the means of improving knowledge.