In the foothillsAbout the time of life, described by Leonard Cohen as “the foothills of old age”. I review current research, evidence and experiences of ageing. Dr Kyra Neubauer, a senior consultant physician with 30 years’ experience in elderly care medicine, has contributed as co-author and guest blogger. |
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Knitted neurons at Francis Crick Institute exhibition, Hello Brain. January 2025
What's in a word?
Dementia is a generic term for several diseases that affect memory, thinking and the ability to perform daily activities, and is more common among women than men. But what a word! Isn’t it about time we came up with a less stigmatising term for diseases of the brain that predominantly affect older people?
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You know the saying “you can’t teach old dogs new tricks”? Well, it turns out that that is not even true for dogs, much less humans. We now know that healthy people can gain new skills and knowledge in older life; and vocabulary even increases until we are about 60 years of age, after which it remains stable, or may slightly decrease.
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This is the first in a series of more technical posts on healthy ageing, in which Dr Kyra Neubauer shares her 30-year experience of working with older people.
Good balance is the secret of human success. An upright posture and the ability to walk on two legs was an important moment in human evolution—freeing up the hands for making and using complex tools, social communication, and other stuff. Anthropologists even credit bipedal locomotion with an important role in the expansion of brain size.
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Highbury Fields, 2024 Photo Lesley Lawson
One of the wonderful things about living in the same neighbourhood for many years is that it has given me an incidental acceptance of the ageing process. I am on nodding terms with any number of local people. I do not know their names, nor where they live, but have followed the arc of their ageing over the past 20 years of my Highbury life: the carefree youth morphing into a proud dad and then a white-haired adult; the walker who developed a limp, had surgery, threw her sticks away; the dog lovers whose ageing pets disappear to be replaced by younger versions.
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Photo: Mark Epstein/Centre for Ageing Better
What are the secrets of a long and healthy life?
Jeane Calment, who died at the age of 122 years and 164 days, was the oldest person ever to have lived. She attributed her longevity to an occasional glass of Port and a diet rich in olive oil. Scientists have speculated whether her great age was due to her genes, her diet or her social life. Sceptics have suggested that it may have been a mother-daughter fraud.
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Photo: Peter Kindersley/Centre for Ageing Better
It is a common assumption that ageing is controlled by the genes we inherit from our forefathers. Far from it. Geriatricians now estimate that, up to the age of 80 years, genes control only 20-30% of our ageing. It is how we have lived our lives that accounts for the rest.
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Photo: Lesley Lawson
At a certain age, meetings with my old friends began to take the form of an “organ recital” of health challenges and woes. I resolved to use my research skills to produce a quick reference to current science and thinking on the topic, an A to Z of ageing.
The first big question was: what exactly is ageing?
There are scientific, cultural and psychological answers to this question.