From chicagotribune.com

Jane Fowler thinks it’s about time college students had “the talk” with their grandparents. She doesn’t mean grandmothers and grandfathers explaining the facts of life. She wants kids to explain safe sex to their elders.

It’s part of a broader message the 72-year-old has advocated for more than a decade. Ever since she contracted HIV when she was in her 50s, Fowler has made it her mission to help aging Baby Boomers and members of her generation avoid her mistakes.

“Once people get past their own embarrassment and understand grandparents today are still sexually active, they realize I’m right,” said Fowler, who spoke at a recent safe-sex event at Kansas State University. “Their grandparents face the same risks of sexually transmitted diseases as they do.”

The over-50 crowd is a relatively small segment of the nation’s at-risk group for sexually transmitted diseases. Approximately four times as many HIV diagnoses occurred in people ages 25 to 44 as in those 50 and older, according to a 2005 report by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Still, medical experts agree that older Americans often are among the most overlooked and, therefore, one of the more vulnerable populations.

Little funding

They point out that most funding for preventive education over the last two decades has been aimed at the traditional high-risk populations, such as teenagers, gay people and urban residents.

Others, however, say that many Baby Boomers were young enough when the public first became aware of the AIDS crisis that they should have gotten plenty of exposure to safe-sex campaigns.

Many older patients feel uneasy discussing sexual behavior with their physicians, according to AARP research. Young doctors, too, can be uncomfortable talking about STD risks with people old enough to be their parents or grandparents, according to a recent study backed by the National Institutes of Health.

Considering that people are living longer than previous generations have, and enjoying extended sex lives because of hormone therapy and erectile-dysfunction drugs, there’s a growing concern that the Baby Boom generation and their elders don’t understand that getting older doesn’t make one immune.

That concern is fueling a national push among public health officials and educators for more prevention efforts aimed at those who are firmly in their golden years.

In Arizona, volunteers regularly have passed out free condoms at community centers, and state health workers in Florida host safe-sex programs in retirement communities. In Broward County, Fla., the Senior HIV Intervention Project recruits retirees throughout the region to become “safe-sexperts” who can persuade their neighbors to get tested for STDs.

At the University of Michigan Health System, enough patients were concerned about the effect of aging on intimacy that a clinic was opened in Ann Arbor in 2006 devoted to dealing with the sexual concerns of the 60-and-older crowd. And in Ohio, professor Nancy Orel and staff at Bowling Green State University have preached about the risks of casual sex and offered free HIV tests.

Talk to grandparents

Orel sells the idea of using condoms and getting tested for HIV as part of serving as a role model for their younger loved ones. But to the undergraduate students taking her gerontology classes at Bowling Green, the roles are reversed. One of the assignments Orel gives is for students to go home, find out what their grandparents know about HIV and discuss safe-sex practices.

“Initially, some of the students are hesitant. But a lot of them are surprised at how open the conversations can be,” said Orel, director of the university’s gerontology department.

A study published last summer in the New England Journal of Medicine reported that most of the 3,005 American adults surveyed, age 57 to 85, continued to have sex two to three times each month.

But, since turning 50, only 38 percent of the men and 22 percent of the women had had a discussion with their doctors about sex, according to the report funded by the National Institutes of Health.

Edward O. Laumann, a professor at the University of Chicago who studies human sexuality and is one of the study’s authors, said older Americans should know better than to have unprotected sex. When the HIV/AIDS epidemic started, he pointed out, many of them were young enough to have been bombarded by public education efforts.

“Educating them isn’t going to affect anything, Laumann said, “and it’s a waste of money, particularly when there’s other vulnerable groups that need the resources anyway.”

Part of the problem with figuring out exactly what risks older Americans face comes from a lack of testing data, said Spencer Lieb, senior epidemiologist at the Bureau of HIV/AIDS at the Florida Department of Health.

He said that although the number of HIV and AIDS patients in the over-50 age group nationwide had grown in recent years, some of the increase was attributed to people who are living longer with the virus or disease, thanks to improvements in therapy treatments.

But without widespread testing, “we don’t really know what the true prevalence [of STD infection] is in this group,” Lieb said. “There’s reason to think, at least anecdotally, this is a combustible situation that is being overlooked.”

From Web MD

Want to shed 14 years off your age? Don’t smoke, get at least half an hour of daily physical activity, drink moderately, and eat five or more daily servings of fruits and vegetables.

That’s the message from a new British study of healthy and not-so-healthy lifestyles and death rates among more than 20,200 men and women.

When the 11-year study began, participants were 45 to 79 years old. They reported their health history, drinking, smoking, and physical activity. They also got their height, weight, and blood level of vitamin C checked.

The researchers used blood levels of vitamin C as sign of which people ate five or more daily servings of fruits and vegetables, which are rich in vitamin C.

During the study, nearly 2,000 participants died. The death rate was four times lower for people with the following four health habits compared to those without any of those health habits:

No smoking

At least half an hour of daily physical activity

Moderate drinking (between one and 14 alcoholic drinks per week)

Eating at least five daily servings of fruits and vegetables (based on blood levels of vitamin C)

Having all four of those health habits “was equivalent to being 14 years younger,” write the University of Cambridge’s Kay-Tee Khaw, PhD, and colleagues. And having one, two, or three of those healthy behaviors was better than nothing.

Social class didn’t explain the results. But keep in mind that doctors don’t advise teetotalers to start drinking, and that it’s wise to get a doctor’s approval before starting a new fitness program, especially if you’ve been inactive for a while.

Khaw’s study appears online in Public Library of Science Medicine.

From Revolution Health

New compounds that act like the red wine ingredient resveratrol may offer a new formula for type 2 diabetes drugs and other age-related diseases, researchers at U.S. drug maker Sirtris Pharmaceuticals said on Wednesday.

“The excitement here is that we’re not talking about red wine anymore. We’re talking about real drugs,” said David Sinclair, an associate professor of pathology at Harvard Medical School and a co-founder of Cambridge, Massachusetts-based Sirtris.

“This is the first time that real drugs have been designed to go after diseases through the genes that control aging,” said Sinclair, whose research appears in the journal Nature.

“One of the drawbacks of resveratrol is the doses need to be large. Now this paper says you can reduce it into a little pill taken once a day,” he said in a telephone interview.

Sinclair and researchers at Sirtris have been looking for drug compounds that mimic the effects of resveratrol, the chemical in red wine that has been shown in several studies to prolong the life of mice and reduce the advance of age-related disease.

They tested some 500,000 molecules to isolate a handful that would have the same effect as resveratrol on the seven genes called sirtuins that have been found in several studies to control the aging process.

Their latest research shows these experimental drug compounds — which are 1,000 times more potent than resveratrol — helped reverse diabetes symptoms and reduce insulin sensitivity in two different studies in diabetic mice and one in rats.

“When you see it work in those three models, you have increased confidence that it will have a universal effect on organisms,” Sinclair said.

He said that is enough to begin human testing, which the company plans for the first half of 2008.

“The chances of success in humans is estimated at 80 to 90 percent. We’ll know next year,” he said, depending on when the company gets the go-ahead from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to start clinical trials.

The discovery may have implications well beyond diabetes drugs, which is itself a $19 billion global market.

“We will make a drug to treat one disease, but it will, as an added bonus, protect you against most of the other diseases of the Western world.”

Those age-related diseases could include cancer, heart disease and Alzheimer’s, he said.

While Sinclair and company executives have high hopes for the compounds, they acknowledge that many compounds that hold great promise in animals fail in humans, either because they are toxic or because they do not work.

Type 2 diabetes, the kind that comes from too little exercise and a poor diet, accounts for about 90 percent of the 180 million cases of diabetes around the world, according to the World Health Organization.

From HealthScout

Many older adults may mistakenly believe that becoming less active is just a normal part of aging, but a new pilot program suggests it’s easy to dispel such notions.

The program led to a 24 percent increase (about 2.5 miles more) in the amount of walking participants did each week, according to the leaders of a University of California, Los Angeles, study.

“We can teach older adults to get rid of those old beliefs that becoming sedentary is just a normal part of growing older. We can teach them that they can and should remain physically active at all ages,” lead author Dr. Catherine Sarkisian, an assistant professor of geriatrics at UCLA’s David Geffen School of Medicine, said in a prepared statement.

The study included 46 sedentary adults, 65 and older, who attended four weekly, hour-long group sessions led by a health educator who used a technique called “attribution retraining” to teach the participants to reject the idea that getting older means becoming sedentary and to believe that they can continue being physically active well into old age.

Each attribution retraining session was followed by a one-hour exercise class that included strength, endurance and flexibility training.

During the study, the number of steps (as measured by electronic pedometers) taken by the participants per week increased from about 24,749 to 30,707 (a 24 percent increase) and their scores on an “age-expectation survey” rose by 30 percent. Their mental health-related quality of life improved, they reported fewer difficulties with daily activities, experienced less pain, had higher energy levels, and got improved sleep.

“The exciting part is that, to our knowledge, this attribution retraining component hasn’t been tested in a physical activity intervention,” Sarkisian said. “It’s been very successful in educational interventions.”

From ScienceDaily.com

Nematode worms treated with lithium show a 46 percent increase in lifespan, raising the tantalizing question of whether humans taking the mood affecting drug are also taking an anti-aging medication.

Lithium has been used to treat mood affective disorders, including bipolar disease for decades. While the drug has been shown to protect neurons, the underlying mechanism of its therapeutic action is not understood. In humans, lithium’s therapeutic range is very limited and the drug has serious side effects. The research provides a novel genetic approach to understanding how lithium works and highlights the utility of using the nematode C. elegans as a research subject in the field of “pharmacogenetics”. Pharmocogenetics involves the study of genetic factors that influence an organism’s reaction to a drug.