Author: Tom

Source http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/tinybuddha/~3/_lrZv76hUTY/

Straight whiskey. That’s my drink of choice, or at least it’s one of them.

Some nights I’ve kicked my heels up with a glass and sipped it slowly simply because I thought it sounded appealing.

Other nights I’ve clutched my glass in a shaking hand with a sense of internal restlessness I couldn’t attribute to anything specific because I had no idea what I was feeling, or why.

And on other nights still I have known what I was feeling and I’ve consciously chosen to drown it with Jim Beam, the buzz in my brain and the warmth in my chest distracting me from what I didn’t want to face.

I thought about this recently after listening to an interview with Sarah Potenza, a singer/songwriter who you may know from season eight of The Voice.

In the fourth episode of Next Creator Up—a podcast I’m producing with my partner in many things and show host Ehren Prudhel—Sarah talked about her experiences with body shamers and naysayers who convinced her she didn’t have what it takes to make it in the music industry.

Though her whole interview spoke to me, because she has a larger than life personality and she’s all about self-acceptance, I was particularly drawn to what she had to say about releasing her pain onstage.

Not only have her scars served as fuel for her music, the act of performing provides a sense of catharsis that makes her feel whole and at peace.

She even noted that if she hasn’t performed in a while she feels like going to a bar and drinking—presumably because without an outlet to release her feelings, she’s tempted to stuff them down. But it’s clear from how she described it that releasing her feelings is a far superior option, and it doesn’t come with a hangover.

“Performance, for me, is so much love but also so much anger. There’s so much passion on the stage in everything I’m doing that it just gets all of that out of my system. I scream it out, I sweat it out, I cry it out, I sing it out, I shout it out. It’s all out there whether it’s the love, the joy, the hate, the anger, the peace, the sorrow, everything. And I just throw it up all over everything, and I feel sated.” ~Sarah Potenza

For me, it’s complicated. And I don’t mean it’s hard to explain. I mean the song, by Avril Lavigne.

It’s among my top-five karaoke choices because I can spit the words out rhythmically as if with a machine gun larynx. I jump and belt with a guttural roar, and it’s like all the weight of the day drains out of me, one “fall” and “crawl” and “break” at a time.

I’m loud and limber and alive, adrenaline pumping through my veins, washing away all residual pain in the intensity of the moment. I shout and it soothes me. I sweat and it cleanses me. It’s release and relief; it’s passion and peace.

And when it’s over, all my emotions splayed out before me like tiny dust particles in the air I can’t see but know are there, I feel not empty but open. Open to joy, open to connection, open to possibilities, open to love.

No glass of whiskey, however satisfying, has ever done that for me. In fact, it’s often done just the opposite. It’s closed my heart and filled me with sadness, as downers generally do. I lose control, the world in front of me blurred not beautified, and I feel not awakened but numb.

I don’t want to feel numb. I want to feel sated not sedated.

It’s easy to forget this, or to remember but deprioritize the things that make me come alive. They don’t feel productive, they’re not profitable, they don’t move the dial on my long-term goals. They may even feel frivolous, like wasting time, when I have so many other things to do.

But I can’t do any good in this world if I’m a walking, ticking time bomb, ever-ready to scatter the shrapnel of my misdirected emotions.

I need an outlet to work through it all—to feel, to heal, to release.

We all do, every last one of us.

We all need something that energizes us, fuels us, calms us, and soothes us, whether it’s creative or physical or both.

And we need to do it regularly, as if our lives depended on it, because in a way, they do.

Sure, we can exist in the world with feelings left unprocessed and unexpressed, but we’re only truly alive if we’re free. And we can’t be free when we’re repressed.

So sing that song, belt it out, even if you’re off key. Dance as if no one’s watching, or someone is but you just don’t care. Paint, write, run, climb—do whatever gets you into a state of flow, and throw yourself so deep into it you lose track of time.

Get out of your head, get into your heart, let yourself get everything out.

And do it without guilt. If it heals and recharges you, it’s not wasting time. It’s making the most of it.

—

If you’re interested in checking out Sarah Potenza’s interview, you can find it here (and you can find all other interviews here). I hope you enjoy it as much as I did!

Get in the conversation! Click here to leave a comment on the site.

The post What to Do with All the Feels That Pile Up in Your Heart appeared first on Tiny Buddha.

Source https://www.fightaging.org/archives/2019/05/differential-access-to-healthcare-has-surprisingly-little-effect-on-mortality/

Today’s open access review paper summarizes the results and methodologies of a number of epidemiological studies in which the authors found there to be surprisingly little variation in mortality resulting from unequal access to healthcare. The analysis of data attributes something like 5% to 15% of overall variation in mortality to differences in healthcare access. Lifestyle choices such as smoking, diet, exercise, and obesity are the largest contribution, accounting for perhaps as much as half or more of the total variation in mortality across populations.

What might we conclude from this sort of analysis? One possibility is that access to healthcare is in fact not all that unequal where it really matters, such as treatment of dangerous infectious disease. The truly vital services, those that are proven, low cost thanks to expiration of patents and economies of scale in production, and that have the most significant effects on mortality in specific cases, are available to near everyone in the study populations. That also implies that those paying for more expensive healthcare services are, on average, obtaining little benefit for the added expense, beyond the signaling effects that attend any conspicuous form of high end consumption.

Another possibility, quite familiar to this audience, is that when it comes to age-related diseases, the medical technologies of the past few decades are just not all that good. Treatments have failed to address the causes of aging, and instead took on the impossible task of trying patch over the consequences in a failing system. The result, with very few exceptions, such as treatments to control blood pressure and blood cholesterol, is therapies offering only marginal, unreliable benefits and little impact to mortality. It remains the case that in the matter of aging, maintaining fitness and slimness is more reliable or even more effective than most of what has been offered by medical science over recent decades. Only with the advent of true rejuvenation therapies, those targeting important mechanisms of aging, such as senolytic treatments that selectively clear senescent cells, will this state of affairs begin to change.

Contributions of Health Care to Longevity: A Review of Four Estimation Methods

It is often argued that improvements in population health, and life expectancy in particular, are best pursued via investments in medical services. Over the last few decades evidence has accumulated, showing that more powerful determinants of health and life expectancy lie elsewhere. Making high-yield investments to extend life expectancy requires an understanding of the relative contributions of health care and other determinants of health to health outcomes. It is estimated that a lack of access to medical care accounts for only about 10% of premature deaths. The methodology underlying these estimates, however, remains obscure. In this article we review four different estimates of the contributions of health care to premature mortality and other health outcomes.

The estimates converge around Schroeder’s conclusion that health care accounts for between 5% and 15% of the variation in premature death. The various methods were consistent in showing that social and behavioral factors account for a much higher percentage of the variation in premature mortality than health care does. For example, the McGinnis/Schroeder method estimates that social circumstances account for about 15% of the variance in early mortality. The Wennberg method estimates that social circumstances account for 29% of variability, and the Park model estimates that social effects account for 46%. Similarly, the McGinnis/Schroeder method estimates that behavior patterns account for 40% of the variability in early mortality, the Wennberg method estimates 65%, and the Park method estimates 29%. In sum, these methods indicate that social and behavioral factors account for substantially more of the variability in premature mortality than health care does.

The suggestion that health care services account for only a small percentage of the variation in national life expectancy has important implications. Both personal and institutional health care expenditures are justified by confidence that health care spending enhances longevity and other indices of population health. Efforts to model the value of health care spending often assume that 100% of the variation in health outcomes is attributable to health care services. Even the most sophisticated models assume that 50% of the variation in population health is attributable to health care. Our analyses reaffirm the belief that health care is one component of a larger set of influences on health outcomes.

Source https://www.healthinaging.org/blog/how-interval-training-affects-belly-fat-in-obese-70-year-olds/

Journal of the American Geriatrics Society Research Summary

By today’s estimates, one-third of adults aged 65 or older are obese. This growing obesity trend, along with the decrease in our level of physical activity as we age, seriously raises our risk of diseases and death.

We know that aging leads to a gradual decrease in lean body mass (LBM). Put simply, LBM is the entire weight of your body minus the weight associated with fat tissue. As we age, fat distribution in the body can shift, and often increases in the belly region. This is a health concern for older adults, because so-called “belly fat” (also known as “central obesity”) is associated with a greater risk for heart disease than general obesity.

Now, a team of researchers have designed a study to learn more about the effects of a 10-week, easy-to-perform, personalized, progressive vigorous-intensity interval training among 70-year-olds with “belly fat.” Their study was published in the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society.

The researchers recruited participants between January 2018 and February 2018 from the Healthy Aging Initiative (HAI), an ongoing study conducted in northern Sweden. In the HAI, all of the 70-year-olds in the area were invited to participate in a free health survey. To date, 68 percent of the eligible population agreed to participate.

The participants who were assigned to the exercise group participated in a 10-week-long progressive exercise program starting in February 2018. The program consisted of short, supervised training sessions, performed in a group setting, three times per week for 10 weeks.

The 36 participants were taught to perform body-weight-training exercises with minimal use of equipment, at first for 18 minutes, alternating exercise with rest periods in a ratio of 40/20 (for example, 40 seconds of work and then 20 seconds of rest). The participants worked up to a 36-minute training period as their training volume gradually increased.

Thirty-six other participants maintained their daily living and routines throughout the study and served as a control group.

The participants were about 70 years of age, and about an equal number of men and women participated.

Participants in the exercise group decreased their fat mass by nearly two pounds and gained about one pound of lean body weight compared to the control group.

The researchers concluded that 10 weeks of vigorous intensity interval training improved body composition in older adults with belly fat. Those in the exercise group saw a nearly tripled decrease in their total fat mass compared with participants in the control group. The exercise group also saw positive effects on total lean body mass. The “do-ability” of the exercise program was reflected in the high attendance rates (89 percent) for the training sessions.

Interestingly, however, the exercise significantly decreased belly fat in the men but not the women who participated. It’s likely that more research is needed to explain this finding in greater detail.

Overall, the researchers suggested that the easy-to-perform exercises, designed to fit a home-environment without the need for expensive gym equipment, may be generalized to other settings and groups of people.

This summary is from “Effects of Interval Training on Visceral Adipose Tissue in Centrally Obese 70-Old-Individuals: A Randomized Controlled Trial.” It appears online ahead of print in the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society. The study authors are Marcel Ballin MSc; Emmy Lundberg BSc; Niklas Sörlén MSc; Peter Nordström MD, PhD; Andreas Hult PhD; and Anna Nordström MD, PhD.

Source https://www.fightaging.org/archives/2019/05/epigenetic-changes-may-act-to-accelerate-progression-of-alzheimers-disease/

Observing epigenetic changes in cells is to observe their reactions to circumstances, as epigenetic mechanisms determine the timing and amount of proteins produced from their genetic blueprints. Protein levels are the switches and dials of the machinery of the cell, determining behavior. These epigenetic changes have consequences, but it is important to remember that they are not root causes. They are a middle portion in a longer process, and thus most likely not the best place to intervene. The present state of technology makes it much easier to examine epigenetic changes than to trace back to root causes, unfortunately, which might tend to bias the medical development emerging from the research community towards less useful approaches.

The primary neuropathological signs of Alzheimer’s disease (AD) are intraneuronal neurofibrillary tangles and extracellular β-amyloid (Aβ) plaques, along with accompanying synaptic and neuronal loss. In general, the distribution of neurofibrillary tangles in the AD brain follows a stereotypic pattern; beginning in the entorhinal/perirhinal cortex, progressing to limbic structures including the hippocampus, and then finally spreading neocortically across the frontal, temporal, and parietal cortex. Loss of neurons and severity of cognitive impairments in AD correspond closely with the burden of tangle pathology.

The neurodegenerative process is also mediated by excessive production and accumulation of Aβ peptides forming plaques. Generation of pathogenic Aβ peptides requires β-secretase (BACE1), which cleaves amyloid precursor protein (APP); the rate-limiting step in Aβ production. Synaptic dysfunction in AD, which is evident long before substantial neuronal loss, has been attributed to elevated BACE1 levels prompting the overproduction of toxic Aβ at synaptic terminals. Recently, it has been demonstrated that Aβ plaques create an environment that enhances the aggregation of tau, which in turn forms intracellular neurofibrillary tangles. Consequently, Aβ and neurofibrillary tangles jointly cooperate in the progression of AD. However, AD is not a normal part of aging and the biological mechanisms causing some individuals, but not others, to develop disease pathology remain unclear.

Epigenetic mechanisms could contribute to AD, as many manifestations of aging, including age-dependent diseases, have an epigenetic basis. Epigenetic marks like DNA methylation regulate gene transcription, are responsive to environmental changes, and show widespread remodeling during aging. Enhancers are genomic elements that modulate the complex spatial and temporal expression of genes, and are subject to epigenetic regulation. Prior genome-wide studies examining DNA methylation changes in the AD brain report a significant overlap between differential methylation and enhancer elements, suggesting that epigenetic disruption of enhancer function contributes to AD. Hence, in this study we perform a genome-wide analysis of DNA methylation at enhancers in neurons from AD brain.

We identify 1224 differentially methylated enhancer regions; most of which are hypomethylated in AD neurons. Methylation losses occur in normal aging neurons, but are accelerated in AD. Integration of epigenetic and transcriptomic data demonstrates a pro-apoptotic reactivation of the cell cycle in post-mitotic AD neurons. Furthermore, AD neurons have a large cluster of significantly hypomethylated enhancers in the DSCAML1 gene that targets BACE1. Hypomethylation of these enhancers in AD is associated with an upregulation of BACE1 transcripts and an increase in amyloid plaques, neurofibrillary tangles, and cognitive decline.

Link: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-019-10101-7

Source https://feeds.feedblitz.com/~/602463542/0/griswoldhomecare~Help-For-The-Elderly-Living-At-Home-More-Support-Needed/

As our beloved family members and relatives grow older, it can become more difficult for them to complete their everyday tasks on their own. They may have a physical ailment or disability that makes it harder for them to move around unassisted. They may suffer from a mental deficiency related to old age, like dementia or Alzheimer’s. Whatever the reason, the elderly person can no longer function as well as he was able to previously. Not only is this frustrating for the older adult who is used to his independence, it is also frustrating for the elderly person’s family and relatives who must take on a caregiving role.
Adding the role of caregiver onto an already busy adult life can feel daunting. You may already be working more than one job, taking care of children, or any number of other responsibilities. There is no doubt that you would happily add taking care of an elderly relative into your schedule if you were able, but sometimes this is simply impossible. In this situation, in home assistance for elderly family members may be the ideal solution.

Help Available for Elderly Living Alone

Home help for the elderly, also known as in-home care, generally consists of a non-medical professional that lives in the home with the elderly or homebound person. The in-home caregiver will work with the elderly in their own home, and can assist with a variety of tasks, including cooking meals, assisting with dressing and bathing, making sure medication is taken on time, and even light housekeeping. The caregiver can also accompany the elderly person to doctor’s visits, social outings, or family events, as well as occasionally provide transportation if necessary. With a caregiver providing assistance for the elderly living at home, the elderly person can lead a regular, full life. Family and friends can rest assured that their loved one is being properly cared for by a trained professional.
I have personal experience looking for help for the elderly living at home. When my great uncle needed support to continue living at home, we turned to an in-home caregiver. I cannot stress enough the relief provided by knowing your elderly relative is in good hands. Before my great uncle had a caregiver, he would frequently call my mother for assistance, sometimes even in the middle of the night. He would forget to take his medication, and once even fell and it was several hours before anyone knew. Having an in-home caregiver was a huge relief for my mother and the rest of the family who no longer had to worry about my great uncle falling, or getting sick and forgetting his pills, or missing a doctor’s appointment because he could no longer drive. The peace of mind for us, and for my uncle who was much less lonely now that someone else was in the house, was worth every penny. The caregiver was even able to accompany him to the hospital when necessary to stay with my uncle and keep my mother and the rest of the family members informed about what was happening. Caregivers provide support for elderly adults living at home, and are a blessing to those in need.
If you are in a situation where more support is needed for elderly people living alone, and you need the peace of mind that comes with knowing they are taken care of, look into in-home caregiving. It is the perfect solution for both you and your elderly loved one.