Older Men Cling To 1950’S, ’60’S Blueprint Of Masculinity

Newswise, October 26, 2016 — As men age, they continue to follow dominant ideas of masculinity learned as youth, leaving them unequipped for the assaults of old age, according to a new study.

The mismatch between aging and the often ageless expectations of popular masculinity leaves senior men without a blueprint to behave or handle emotions, according to a new literature review from Case Western Reserve University.

Men who embodied prevailing cultural and societal hallmarks of manliness as younger men—projecting an aura of toughness and independence, avoiding crying and vulnerability, while courageously taking risks—are confronted by the development of health problems, loss of spouses and loved ones, retirement and needing to be a caregiver for ailing family members in later life.

“Who you are in the past is embedded in you,” said Kaitlyn Barnes Langendoerfer, a doctoral student in sociology at Case Western Reserve and co-author of the review, which mined narrative data from nearly 100 previously published studies.

 “Men have trouble dealing with older age because they’ve followed a masculinity script that left little room for them to negotiate unavoidable problems.”

“In our study, we hear men struggling with grief—which is a vulnerable state—and caregiving, which is associated with femininity,” she said.

“If they must cry, men feel it’s to be done in the home, away from others, even when spouse has died. They have to renegotiate their masculinity in order to deal with what life is bringing their way.”

This masculinity “script” still embraced by older men was outlined as the four-part Blueprint of Manhood, first published by sociologist Robert Brannon when the men in the studies were entering adulthood in the 1970’s. The blueprint included:

No Sissy Stuff - men are to avoid being feminine, show no weaknesses and hide intimate aspects of their lives.

The Big Wheel - men must gain and retain respect and power and are expected to seek success in all they do.

The Sturdy Oak – men are to be ‘‘the strong, silent type” by projecting an air of confidence and remaining calm no matter what.

Give ‘em Hell – men are to be tough, adventurous, never give up and live life on the edge.

“We’re all aging; it’s a fact of life. But as men age, they’re unable to be who they were, and that creates a dissonance that is hard to reconcile,” said Langendoerfer, who studies aging in men.

“We need to better understand how older men adapt to their stressors—high suicide rates, emotions they stifle, avoiding the doctor—to hopefully help them build better lives in older age,” she said.

The review, published in the journal Men and Masculinities, was co-written by Edward Thompson Jr., an emeritus professor of sociology and anthropology at the College of the Holy Cross and now an affiliate of the Department of Sociology at Case Western Reserve.

Most of the data came from studies with white, middle-class men from the United States, Canada and Europe who had stable careers. “More research inclusive of different races and socioeconomic backgrounds is needed to obtain a more complete picture of how older men adapt,” Langendoerfer said. 

Death and Dying in America

May 25, 2016--Why is Alzheimer’s disease causing relatively more deaths in Washington state?  State and local health officials increasingly plumb such disparities for clues that may help them develop preventive programs and save lives.

For instance, Kentucky and New Hampshire have high rates of death by accidental poisoning, which includes drug overdose. In response, Kentucky has begun a program to monitor the prescribing of addictive painkillers. It has also expanded the availability of treatment for substance abuse.

New Hampshire Gov. Maggie Hassan, a Democrat, signed a bill in January calling for stiffer penalties for drug dealers and more tracking of prescription drugs, calling the epidemic of heroin and prescription painkillers “the most pressing public health and public safety issue facing our state.”

Sometimes states can only do so much about higher incidents of mortality. Take suicide, for example. Guns often are more available in some Western states, said Catherine Barber, who directs the Means Matter Campaign at Harvard University. Their prevalence can drive up suicide rates, she said, not because gun owners are more likely to be suicidal — but because guns are more lethal if a person decides to commit suicide.

Data Drives Action

After noticing a stubbornly high rate of liver disease, intoxicated-driving and other causes of alcohol-related deaths, New Mexico’s Health Department this year began an alcohol-awareness programthat focuses on areas of the state where the problem is most acute.

“The rate was not improving over time,” said Rosa Isabel Lopez, health data dissemination coordinator for the state health agency. “The decision was made to create more data points for community audiences and get this information into the hands of our neighborhoods.”

The state also launched a public website last year that displays data on health issues in small areas of the state, which communities can use to understand problems and target them.

Local detail, plenty of data, and plain language for policymakers are important aspects of successful state efforts to prevent deaths, said Ross Brownson, an epidemiologist at Washington University in St. Louis who wrote a 2010 guide on the subject.

“We like to say, ‘What gets measured gets solved,’ ” Brownson said. Until recently, he said, communities often didn’t have enough details about health problems to make policy decisions.

In the last few years, he said, there’s been improvement nationally in collecting and distributing health data. The University of Wisconsin’s Population Health Institute, for instance, introduced county health rankings for Wisconsin in 2003, and then expanded them nationwide in 2010.

The rankings noted drug overdose deaths “reaching epidemic proportions” in some areas such as northern Appalachia, and rising 79 percent nationwide since 2002. The Stateline analysis also found high rates of accidental poisoning, which includes drug overdoses, in Massachusetts and New Hampshire.

Deadly Puzzle

In Wisconsin and nearby Iowa and Minnesota, there are disproportionate instances of accidental falls that are fatal. It’s a phenomenon that has puzzled researchers for years, said Patrick Remington, an associate dean at the School of Medicine and Public Health at the University of Wisconsin.

“We’ve supposed that it’s due to cloudy weather, no sun and so no vitamin D [which promotes bone health], but there’s not been a good answer yet,” Remington said. Wisconsin’s Health Department has a fall prevention program, which points out that the elderly are particularly susceptible to falling.

Elizabeth Stein, a preventive medicine resident at the University of Wisconsin medical school, said low vitamin D levels can lead to both fatal falls and dementia in older people, though studies have yet to confirm a link between those causes of death and the area’s cloudy weather.

Washington state prepared a plan to address Alzheimer’s disease last year after data indicated it was the state’s third leading cause of death, killing people at a rate two-thirds higher than the national average. Worse, Alzheimer’s was on the rise while other top killers like cancer and heart disease were in decline.

But the apparent rise could be attributed to better data. Washington has a more rigorous method of collecting and verifying death data than some other states. States’ totals for all deaths from dementia, which includes Alzheimer’s, suggests that many might not be reporting the disease as carefully as Washington.

Differences between the states in recognizing and coding the cause of death can muddy the picture, said Francis Boscoe, a research scientist at the New York State Cancer Registry who used differing death rates by state as a “conversation starter” about state-specific mortality issues.

“It seems entirely plausible that physicians or coroners in Washington could be coding as Alzheimer’s what other states might call pneumonia or something else,” Boscoe said. “There are explicit rules for all this, but that does not mean they are all being followed the same way.”

After Boscoe wrote last year about peculiar death patterns in states, he said he heard plenty of feedback about data-collection issues that can make for misleading numbers.

Flawed Death Certificates

As Stateline has reported, how the cause of death is recorded on death certificates, from which officials draw data, can vary widely even within a state.

In Kansas, for instance, what appeared to be the most distinctive cause of death — hardening of the arteries, or atherosclerosis, killing people there at seven times the national rate — was actually more of a data-recording problem than a medical one.

“This is a classification issue,” said Cassie Sparks, of the Kansas Department of Health and Environment. She said the state plans to emphasize better reporting and classification in training materials for medical examiners and others who sign death certificates.

But even if some data is flawed, cities and states can get life-saving or life-extending results by taking action on the evidence of health problems that do emerge. Brownson of Washington University in St. Louis points to New York City as an example.

The life expectancy in the city grew faster than the national average, paced by drops in heart disease, cancer and HIV from 2001 to 2010, a study published in the current Journal of Public Health Management & Practice found.

New York has focused in recent years on using health trends to guide new, albeit sometimes controversial, public policy — from restrictions on trans fats and tobacco to unsuccessful bans on oversized portions of sweetened drinks.

“The city health department is really a prime example of evidence-based policy, of making the policy dependent on the data,” Brownson said.

Researchers Pinpoint Part of the Brain That Recognizes Facial Expressions

New machine learning algorithm can identify the facial expression a person is looking at based on neural activity

Newswise, April 21, 2016—Researchers at The Ohio State University have pinpointed the area of the brain responsible for recognizing human facial expressions.

It’s on the right side of the brain behind the ear, in a region called the posterior superior temporal sulcus (pSTS).

In a paper published today in the Journal of Neuroscience, the researchers report that they used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to identify a region of pSTS as the part of the brain activated when test subjects looked at images of people making different facial expressions.

Further, the researchers have discovered that neural patterns within the pSTS are specialized for recognizing movement in specific parts of the face. One pattern is tuned to detect a furrowed brow, another is tuned to detect the upturn of lips into a smile, and so on.

“That suggests that our brains decode facial expressions by adding up sets of key muscle movements in the face of the person we are looking at,” said Aleix Martinez, a cognitive scientist and professor of electrical and computer engineering at Ohio State.

Martinez said that he and his team were able to create a machine learning algorithm that uses this brain activity to identify what facial expression a person is looking at based solely on the fMRI signal.

“Humans use a very large number of facial expressions to convey emotion, other non-verbal communication signals and language,” Martinez said.

“Yet, when we see someone make a face, we recognize it instantly, seemingly without conscious awareness. In computational terms, a facial expression can encode information, and we’ve long wondered how the brain is able to decode this information so efficiently.

“Now we know that there is a small part of the brain devoted to this task.”

Using this fMRI data, the researchers developed a machine learning algorithm that has about a 60 percent success rate in decoding human facial expressions, regardless of the facial expression and regardless of the person viewing it.

“That’s a very powerful development, because it suggests that the coding of facial expressions is very similar in your brain and my brain and most everyone else’s brain,” Martinez said.

The study doesn’t say anything about people who exhibit atypical neural functioning, but it could give researchers new insights, said study co-author Julie Golomb, assistant professor of psychology and director of the Vision and Cognitive Neuroscience Lab at Ohio State.

“This work could have a variety of applications, helping us not only understand how the brain processes facial expressions, but ultimately how this process may differ in people with autism, for example,” she said.

Doctoral student Ramprakash Srinivasan, Golomb and Martinez placed 10 college students into an fMRI machine and showed them more than 1,000 photographs of people making facial expressions.

The expressions corresponded to seven different emotional categories: disgusted, happily surprised, happily disgusted, angrily surprised, fearfully surprised, sadly fearful and fearfully disgusted.

While some of the expressions were positive and others negative, they all had some commonalities among them.

For instance, “happily surprised,” “angrily surprised” and “fearfully surprised” all include raised eyebrows, though other parts of the face differ when we express these three emotions.

fMRI detects increased blood flow in the brain, so the research group was able to obtain images of the part of the brain that was activated when the students recognized different expressions. Regardless of the expression they were looking at, all the students showed increased activity in the same region—the pSTS.

Then the research group used a computer to cross-reference the fMRI images with the different facial muscle movements shown in the test photographs.

They were able to create a map of regions within the pSTS that activated for different facial muscle groups, such as the muscles of the eyebrows or lips.

First, they constructed maps using the fMRIs of 9 of the participants. Then, they fed the algorithm the fMRI images from the 10th student, and asked it to identify the expressions that student was looking at. Then they repeated the experiment, creating the map from scratch with data from nine of the students, but using a different student as the 10th subject.

About 60 percent of the time, the algorithm was able to accurately identify the facial expression that the 10th person was looking at, based solely on that person’s fMRI image.

Martinez called the results “very positive,” and said that they indicate that the algorithm is making strides toward an understanding of what happens in that region of the brain.

The researchers will continue the work, which was funded by the National Institutes of Health and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation

Researchers Seeking Ways to Help Older Adults Preserve Their Mobility

Newswise, April 14, 2016-- There’s no getting around it: Simply getting around is a major issue for older adults.

“People are in nursing homes for two reasons, either they can’t think or they can’t walk,” said Stephen Kritchevsky, Ph.D., director of the Sticht Center on Aging at Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center. North Carolina.

“We’re working very hard on the thinking part, and the walking part is equally important.

“The older people who report the highest life satisfaction, and who also seem to live longer, are those with intact and robust social networks. The ability to walk is fundamental to maintaining one’s social contacts and remaining independent. Mobility is critical to quality of life in addition to physical health.”

Kritchevsky is among the Wake Forest Baptist researchers collaborating with colleagues across the country to find ways to keep older adults on their feet.

Backed by a $5.3 million National Institutes of Health (NIH) grant, Wake Forest Baptist and five other institutions are launching a multi-site study to determine if reducing the chronic, low-grade inflammation that is common in the elderly can help avert mobility problems.

“The levels of inflammation we are studying are way below the levels that you can observe when there’s an acute infection,” said Marco Pahor, M.D., director of the Institute on Aging at the University of Florida and co-principal investigator of the study with Walter T. Ambrosius, Ph.D., professor and chair of biostatistical sciences at Wake Forest Baptist. “We are talking about inflammation that’s associated with aging, not disease.”

The researchers will enlist 300 older adults who either have or are at risk for mobility limitations and see whether omega-3 fish oil and the blood pressure drug losartan – both of which have proven effective in lessening inflammation – can improve their physical function and help prevent mobility loss.

Wake Forest Baptist is the data coordinating center for the study – responsible for overall data management, monitoring and communication among all sites and general oversight of the project – and also a field site.

The other participating institutions, in addition to the University of Florida, are Tufts University, Northwestern University, the University of Pittsburgh and the University of Vermont.

“This is looking at reducing inflammation in the hopes that we might be able to design a larger study that would target inflammation in order to preserve the ability of people to walk,” Ambrosius said.

“But the ultimate goal is to develop therapies that can preserve people’s ability to walk unassisted and live independently.”

Kritchevsky said the inflammation project has essentially the “same infrastructure” as a 2014 study that was the first to demonstrate that exercise can help prevent mobility loss in older adults.

In that NIH-funded trial, which included 1,635 sedentary men and women ages 70 to 89, the participants who followed a structured, moderate-intensity exercise program for an average of 2.6 years were 18 percent less likely to suffer mobility disability than those who took part in a program of health education workshops and stretching exercises.

That study also was led by Pahor and coordinated by Wake Forest Baptist. It was conducted at eight field sites: five that are involved in the current inflammation study – Wake Forest Baptist, Florida, Tufts, Northwestern and Pittsburgh – plus Stanford, Yale and Louisiana State universities.

Taking yet another approach to promoting mobility in seniors is Denise Houston, Ph.D., associate professor of geriatrics and gerontology at Wake Forest Baptist. Her focus is on vitamin D, which is essential to bone strength and can have positive effects on other parts of the anatomy, including muscle.

Most of the vitamin D the body needs is produced through exposure to sunlight, but it also can be obtained by consuming fatty fish such as salmon, tuna and mackerel; “fortified” products such as milk, juices and cereals; and supplements.

“Unfortunately, for a variety of reasons a lot of older adults have inadequate intakes of vitamin D,” Houston said.

“The current recommendations for vitamin D are based on bone health, and we’re trying to see if those numbers are the same or need to be adjusted for muscle health.”

In a 2012 study that examined data from more than 2,000 older adults, Houston found that over a six-year period those who had low vitamin D levels were 30 percent more likely to develop mobility limitations and 90 percent more likely to develop mobility disability than those with higher levels.

In a 2015 study of 68 homebound seniors with low vitamin D levels, she found that those who received a monthly vitamin D supplement with a Meals on Wheels delivery reported half as many falls as their counterparts who received a placebo.

In an NIH-supported clinical trial currently under way at Wake Forest Baptist, Houston is testing vitamin D’s effects on muscle function in older adults.

The study will eventually include 200 people ages 65 to 89 with low-normal vitamin D levels and some difficulty performing tasks such as getting in and out of a chair or walking up stairs. Half the participants get a year’s supply of vitamin D pills to be taken once daily while the others receive placebo pills.

All participants are tested for vitamin D levels, muscle qualities and physical capabilities at three intervals over a 12-month period.

“What we’re trying to find out in this study is how vitamin D affects risk factors for falls such as balance and muscle strength,” Houston said, “and whether increasing vitamin D levels in people at risk for mobility problems can improve their balance, muscle strength and function, leading to better mobility and a lower risk of falling.”

Link Between Sleep and Social Participation May Be Key to Healthy Aging

Newswise, March 3, 2016 – Sleep may be one of the most important factors for well-being; yet, according to the CDC, one in three adults does not get enough. 

Lack of sleep can lead to potential cognitive declines, chronic diseases and death. Now, research from the University of Missouri finds that older adults who have trouble sleeping, could benefit from participating in social activities, in particular attending religious events. 

“Social connectedness is a key component for health and well-being for older adults,” said Jen-Hao Chen, assistant professor of health sciences at the MU School of Health Professions and the Truman School of Public Affairs. “Close connections to, and participation in, social groups provides a sense of belonging and can be essential for healthy aging.”

Yet despite past attention to the link between social participation and many different health outcomes, little research has been dedicated to linking social participation and another critical health outcome for older adults—sleep.

To study the relationship between sleep and social participation for older adults, Chen analyzed two waves of data collected over a five year period from the National Social Life, Health and Aging Project. 

He looked at three aspects of social participation; volunteering, attending religious services and being part of organized group activities. He then compared the data to sleep outcomes measured by actigraphy—wearable wrist sleep trackers. Results showed that older adults with greater levels of social participation were getting better sleep.

However, Chen says despite the strong associations between social participation and sleep, social participation does not necessarily lead to better sleep. The strong associations he found could also be due to those already sleeping well may feel well enough to be more active socially. His future research on sleep will continue to use innovative sleep measurements to understand the role various social relationships have on sleep behaviors and outcomes.

“When it comes to the discussion of healthy lifestyle, being socially connected and sleeping well are not often mentioned together,” Chen said. 

“Yet sleep, just like physical activity and diet, can have significant impacts on our health outcomes, and is profoundly affected by our everyday social life. To promote sleep health we must consider a comprehensive approach that emphasizes the role of engaging in our communities, as well as getting enough and better sleep.”

The study “Social Participation and Older Adults’ Sleep” was published in the Journal of Social Science and Medicine. Chen collaborated with Diane Lauderdale and Linda Waite at the University of Chicago on the study. The research was supported by the National Institute of Aging (R01AG042164 and R37AG030481) and the Basic Behavioral and Social Sciences Research Opportunity Network National Institutes of Health. 

Natural Metabolite Might Reset Aging Biological Clocks

Newswise, October 16, 2015 — As we age, our biological clocks tend to wind down – but why? A Weizmann Institute of Science research team has now revealed an intriguing new link between a group of metabolites whose levels drop as our cells age and the functioning of our circadian clocks – mechanisms encoded in our genes that keep time to cycles of day and night. 

Their results, which appeared in Cell Metabolism, suggest that the substance, which is found in many foods, could help keep our internal timekeepers up to speed.

Dr. Gad Asher’s lab in the Department of Biological Chemistry investigates these circadian clocks, trying to understand how these natural timekeepers help regulate, and are affected by, everything from nutrition to metabolism. 

In the present study, he and his research student Ziv Zwighaft were following clues that certain metabolites called polyamines could be tied to the functioning of circadian clocks. 

We get polyamines from food, but our cells manufacture them as well. These substances are known to regulate a number of essential processes in the cell, including growth and proliferation. And the levels of polyamines have been found to naturally drop as we age.

Working with mice and cultured cells, they found that, indeed, enzymes that are needed to manufacture polyamines undergo cycles that are tied to both feeding and circadian rhythms of day and night. In mice engineered to lack a functional circadian clock, these fluctuations did not occur.

As the researchers continued to investigate, they discovered a sort of feedback loop: polyamine production is not only regulated by circadian clocks but, in turn, also regulate the ticking of those clocks. In cell cultures, adding high levels of polyamines more or less obliterated the circadian rhythm, while maintaining low levels slowed the clock by around two hours. 

“The polyamines are actually an embedded part of the circadian clockwork,” says Dr. Asher.

The scientists then asked how this plays out in younger and older mice, with their naturally higher or lower polyamine levels. It is known that the circadian clocks of elderly mice run more slowly; concomitantly, their polyamine levels decline. 

The team found they could slow down the clocks in the young mice by administering a drug to inhibit polyamine synthesis. In contrast, adding a polyamine to the drinking water of the older mice made their clocks run faster than others of their age group and actually restored their function, similar to that of the young mice.

Dr. Asher and his team intend to continue investigating the function of polyamines in circadian systems. 

“This discovery demonstrates the tight intertwining between circadian clocks and metabolism,” says Mr. Zwighaft. “Our findings today rely on experiments with mice, but we think they might hold true in humans. If so, they will have broad clinical implications,” Dr. Asher says. 

“The ability to repair the clock simply, through nutritional intervention with polyamine supplementation, is exciting and obviously of great clinical potential.”

Dr. Gad Asher’s research is supported by the Willner Family Leadership Institute; the Yeda-Sela Center for Basic Research; the Adelis Foundation; the Abisch Frenkel Foundation for the Promotion of Life Sciences; the Crown Endowment Fund for Immunology Research; and the Samuel M. Soref and Helene K. Soref Foundation.

The Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel, is one of the world’s top-ranking multidisciplinary research institutions. The Institute’s 3,800-strong scientific community engages in research addressing crucial problems in medicine and health, energy, technology, agriculture, and the environment. 

Outstanding young scientists from around the world pursue advanced degrees at the Weizmann Institute’s Feinberg Graduate School. The discoveries and theories of Weizmann Institute scientists have had a major impact on the wider scientific community, as well as on the quality of life of millions of people worldwide