Monday, November 30, 2009
Can Boomers Lead an Elder Revolution?
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The implications of an aging world are widely viewed with alarm. When 10,000 people a day begin reaching retirement age in a few years, how will society support them? And when these people are turning 65, thousands more will be turning 80 or 85. Who will take care of them? And how will we afford the bills? This enormous price tag is the elephant in the room during debates about healthcare reform.
These are fair points. But what if, instead, an aging world turned out to be a good thing? Is this even possible? Well, nearly 80 million baby boomers are here to say that they've had a great run so far and they expect, no, they demand, that it will continue. AARP and other powerful advocates for seniors' interests are working toward positive outcomes as well. Are we moving toward a seniors-dominated world? And if that's so, what might this world look like?
Forty years ago, Theodore Roszak wrote The Making of a Counter Culture, which captured the late-1960s disaffection by young people across the country. They had been raised in material comfort following World War II, but they rejected the world created by those comforts. They opposed the Vietnam War and the industrial-military complex they blamed for the war. Of course, the protesters of the 1960s and 1970s did eventually join the rat race they had earlier condemned. They were the leading edge of the baby boomer generation, and they became more materialistic and prosperous by far than the corporate "sell outs" they had criticized in their youth.
Roszak, a college teacher and author of 15 books who is now in his late 70s, has issued another rallying cry to this generation with The Making of an Elder Culture, published earlier this year. In it, he argues that the baby boomers are hardly finished making their mark on the world. "Boomers, who will usher us into senior dominance, are the best educated, most socially conscientious, most politically savvy older generation the world has ever seen," he says. "I believe that generation will want to do good things with the power that history has unexpectedly thrust upon it in its senior years. What boomers left undone in their youth, they will return to take up in their maturity."
Roszak is still crusading. Conservative government leaders and consumption-driven corporations are still his bad guys. But while he makes a lot of valid points, the polemics of The Making of an Elder Culture can get in the way of the powerful forces at work here. Seniors have rising power, in numbers and especially in the voting booth. This is a global trend; the U.S. actually is younger than other industrial democracies. Advances in agriculture have enabled sustainable increases in world population. Advances in medicine have permitted this growing population to reach ages never seen before.
In the elder culture that Roszak envisions, longevity and health become driving social and economic forces. Aging boomers will return to their youthful idealism. They will work to improve the environment and climate problems. They will volunteer like crazy. In their longer lives, they will embrace newly rediscovered values. "The final stage of life is uniquely suited to the creation of new social forms and cultural possibilities," he says. "Age offers us the opportunity to detach from the competitive, high-consumption priorities that dominated us on the job and in the marketplace."
Consuming less is both an effect and an enabling cause of an emerging elder culture. Creating much smaller consumption footprints will relieve environmental pressures and also force businesses to change their priorities. Smaller working-age populations can still meet society's material needs if those needs are pared back. Healthcare consumption will be much more important, but it will be less resource-intensive. "The money we lay out for healthcare should be seen, not as a regrettable cost, but as an investment in economic progress," Roszak says. "The raw material of our economy will be ailing and aging bodies, the product will be better health, longer lives. . . . We will wake up to the fact that health and longevity are, at last, the highest state of industrial development."
While Roszak paints a very rosy future, he recognizes that it won't come about smoothly or without some serious conflicts. He places a lot of faith, perhaps too much, in the ultimate power of senior majorities to get their way in a democratic society. "Not many societies have treated their seniors as more than troublesome dependents who are expected to stand aside and let life pass them by," he observes. "We have no precedent for an insurgent elder population."
Two battlegrounds predicted by Roszak deserve mention. Both conflicts have been underway for some time but increasingly are coming out into the open. Who will pay for the longevity revolution? he asks. That question is central to the healthcare-reform debates over changes to Medicare and Medicaid. "Whatever the outcome, entitlements will be the battlefield on which the first great campaigns of the elder culture are waged," Roszak says.
The second battlefield involves the upwards of 25 million Americans -- mostly women, mostly unpaid -- who now care for aging relatives. The model of home-based, family care was created in the 1800s and 1900s when there were no government safety nets and when large families were better equipped to take care of themselves. Today, more and more family members are surviving into their 80s and 90s, and are living with chronic conditions that once would have meant a quick death sentence. They are overwhelming family caregivers in both their numbers and the complexity and intensity of their medical needs. And this is happening even as family structures are crumbling.
"We are keeping people alive well beyond any limit for which the family was designed to provide wholly self-reliant care," Roszak says. This situation won't be tolerated indefinitely: "The revolt of the caregivers, when it comes, may be the turning point in the history of the elder culture, as distinctive and defining as the anti-war rallies of the 1960s and 1970s."
If baby boomers and older seniors need a role model for how to build an elder culture, Roszak holds up one drawn from their youth -- Maggie Kuhn, who founded the Gray Panthers nearly 40 years ago after she was forced into retirement at the age of 65 (she died in 1995 at the age of 89). It's clear that Roszak hopes and expects that many Maggie Kuhns will emerge from the ranks of today's baby boomers.
It's time for the aged to lead the way, he quotes Kuhn as saying: "The old, having the benefit of life experience, the time to get things done, and the least to lose by sticking their necks out, [are] in a perfect position to serve as the advocates for the larger public good."
By Philip Moeller, US News
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Friday, November 27, 2009
Before Lucy came Ardi, new earliest hominid found
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WASHINGTON - The story of humankind is reaching back another million years as scientists learn more about "Ardi," a hominid who lived 4.4 million years ago in what is now Ethiopia. The 110-pound, 4-foot female roamed forests a million years before the famous Lucy, long studied as the earliest skeleton of a human ancestor.
This older skeleton reverses the common wisdom of human evolution, said anthropologist C. Owen Lovejoy of Kent State University.
Rather than humans evolving from an ancient chimp-like creature, the new find provides evidence that chimps and humans evolved from some long-ago common ancestor — but each evolved and changed separately along the way.
"This is not that common ancestor, but it's the closest we have ever been able to come," said Tim White, director of the Human Evolution Research Center at the University of California, Berkeley.
The lines that evolved into modern humans and living apes probably shared an ancestor 6 million to 7 million years ago, White said in a telephone interview.
But Ardi has many traits that do not appear in modern-day African apes, leading to the conclusion that the apes evolved extensively since we shared that last common ancestor.
A study of Ardi, under way since the first bones were discovered in 1994, indicates the species lived in the woodlands and could climb on all fours along tree branches, but the development of their arms and legs indicates they didn't spend much time in the trees. And they could walk upright, on two legs, when on the ground.
Formally dubbed Ardipithecus ramidus - which means root of the ground ape - the find is detailed in 11 research papers published Thursday by the journal Science.
"This is one of the most important discoveries for the study of human evolution," said David Pilbeam, curator of paleoanthropology at Harvard's Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology.
"It is relatively complete in that it preserves head, hands, feet and some critical parts in between. It represents a genus plausibly ancestral to Australopithecus - itself ancestral to our genus Homo," said Pilbeam, who was not part of the research teams.
Scientists assembled the skeleton from 125 pieces.
Lucy, also found in Africa, thrived a million years after Ardi and was of the more human-like genus Australopithecus.
"In Ardipithecus we have an unspecialized form that hasn't evolved very far in the direction of Australopithecus. So when you go from head to toe, you're seeing a mosaic creature that is neither chimpanzee, nor is it human. It is Ardipithecus," said White.
White noted that Charles Darwin, whose research in the 19th century paved the way for the science of evolution, was cautious about the last common ancestor between humans and apes.
"Darwin said we have to be really careful. The only way we're really going to know what this last common ancestor looked like is to go and find it. Well, at 4.4 million years ago we found something pretty close to it," White said. "And, just like Darwin appreciated, evolution of the ape lineages and the human lineage has been going on independently since the time those lines split, since that last common ancestor we shared."
Some details about Ardi in the collection of papers:
• Ardi was found in Ethiopia's Afar Rift, where many fossils of ancient plants and animals have been discovered. Findings near the skeleton indicate that at the time it was a wooded environment. Fossils of 29 species of birds and 20 species of small mammals were found at the site.
• Geologist Giday WoldeGabriel of Los Alamos National Laboratory was able to use volcanic layers above and below the fossil to date it to 4.4 million years ago.
• Ardi's upper canine teeth are more like the stubby ones of modern humans than the long, sharp, pointed ones of male chimpanzees and most other primates. An analysis of the tooth enamel suggests a diverse diet, including fruit and other woodland-based foods such as nuts and leaves.
• Paleoanthropologist Gen Suwa of the University of Tokyo reported that Ardi's face had a projecting muzzle, giving her an ape-like appearance. But it didn't thrust forward quite as much as the lower faces of modern African apes do. Some features of her skull, such as the ridge above the eye socket, are quite different from those of chimpanzees. The details of the bottom of the skull, where nerves and blood vessels enter the brain, indicate that Ardi's brain was positioned in a way similar to modern humans, possibly suggesting that the hominid brain may have been already poised to expand areas involving aspects of visual and spatial perception.
• Ardi's hand and wrist were a mix of primitive traits and a few new ones, but they don't include the hallmark traits of the modern tree-hanging, knuckle-walking chimps and gorillas. She had relatively short palms and fingers which were flexible, allowing her to support her body weight on her palms while moving along tree branches, but she had to be a careful climber because she lacked the anatomical features that allow modern-day African apes to swing, hang and easily move through the trees.
• The pelvis and hip show the gluteal muscles were positioned so she could walk upright.
• Her feet were rigid enough for walking but still had a grasping big toe for use in climbing.
The research was funded by the National Science Foundation, the Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics of the University of California, Los Alamos National Laboratory, the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science and others.
By RANDOLPH E. SCHMID, AP Science Writer
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Wednesday, November 25, 2009
Americans Tame Their Wanderlust
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NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) - Americans have tamed their wanderlust during this recession, according to the latest data released by the U.S. Census Bureau. Only about 2.4% of Americans moved from state to state in 2008, down from 2.5% the previous year.
"The mobility rate is lower than it has been in years," said Robert Lang, a demographer with Virginia Tech University. "There's a recession and a housing bust. People can't sell their homes in California and move to Las Vegas or sell their condo in Florida and move to North Carolina."
"People are hunkering down, trying to hold on to what they have," added Andy Beveridge, a demographer and sociology professor at Queens College in New York. "It's a depression, recession mentality."
Plus, a good portion of the population has reached the age where the charm of a new place is more than offset by the fetters of life and responsibilities. "A large share of the population is at the age where they're settled," Lang said. "The baby boomers have good jobs and most are not ready to retire."
Shunning the lands of sun and surf
Perpetually booming Florida may actually have fewer people than in 2007.
During 2008, 2.8% of the Sunshine State's population hadn't lived there the year before, and the net domestic migration -- the difference between Americans moving into a state and those moving out -- was negative for the first time in recent history.
Nearly 10,000 more Americans fled the land of the Dolphins and the Devil Rays than moved in, according to the Census. That followed average gains of more than 200,000 a year from 2001 through 2006.
"It looks like the first time in recorded history that Florida lost population," Beveridge said.
(That's slight hyperbole: Florida's population did drop in 1946, in the aftermath of World War II.)
California also saw a decline in the number of people coming to partake of its sand and sea. A mere 1.3% of California residents moved in from out of state in 2008. That's off from 1.4% in 2007.
For years, Americans have been fleeing the Golden State. The population kept growing only because of foreign immigration and births. All through the 2000s there has been a net loss in domestic migration, with 800,000 more Americans leaving than moving in during the three years ended in 2007. As it became more difficult to sell homes, that out-flow eased. That, combined with the newcomers, meant the population fell by only 144,000 in 2008.
The housing bust, and the harm it did to employment, seems to have pushed more people to leave bubble markets like California and Florida than have been drawn in by more affordable home prices.
"The Florida economy is based on growth and home construction," said Lang. With building projects dying on the vine, unemployment soared to 7.6% for the state in 2008. It's now up to 10.7%.
The same job problems plague many California cities, especially Central Valley towns like Stockton, Fresno and Merced. Construction-related job losses helped send state unemployment to 8.7% by December 2008 from 5.9% a year earlier. Today, some cities report breathtakingly high unemployment rates: 30.2% in El Centro; 17.6% in Merced; and 17.2% in Yuba City.
So, where are they moving?
So, if people aren't heading for the good life in California and Florida, where are they going?
D.C., Alaska and Wyoming. (Seriously.)
The nation's capital saw 7.6% of its residents arrive in 2008; Alaska attracted 6% more people to the Last Frontier (up a full percent from 2007); and 5.2% more people wanted to be Wyoming cowboys.
To be fair, however, small populations in these places convert modest in-migration increases into large percentage gains. They're each among the smallest states (or district) in the Union. That's just the opposite of California and Florida where each percentage point represents hundreds of thousands of people.
Don't mess with Texas
In terms of net migration -- those moving in minus those leaving -- Texas was the star performer in 2008, with the population growing by 140,000.
That meshes with what moving company Allied Van Lines experienced. "We moved more people here than anywhere in the U.S. in the last several years," said David King, general manager of Berger Transfer and Storage in Houston, Texas, and Allied Van Lines' largest booking and hauling agent.
The moving company recorded 5,891 inbound shipments and 3,988 outbound shipments in 2008, a net gain of 1,903. That was just slightly lower than last year's net gain of 2,041.
That influx may be due to the state's employment picture, which has remained rosier than most other places thanks to the energy industry and a welcoming business climate. Plus, home prices never cycled through a boom-bust period: They've remained affordable, which facilitates mobility.
In contrast, battered Michigan, with its housing and job woes, was the least-popular place to move to. The state experienced a net loss of 109,000 people, or 1.1%, in 2008, according to the Census. Allied said its outbound shipments totaled 2,388, more than double its inbound shipments of 1,181.
New York State lost even more people than Michigan -- 126,000 people -- but because it has a larger population to begin with, the percentage drop is just 0.7%, almost identical to New Jersey's.
Moving down the block
The Census Bureau also reported that fewer residents were moving within their home states.
The percentage of people who lived in different homes within the same state dropped to 12.6% during 2008. It was 12.8% in 2007 and 13% in 2005, when housing markets were hopping.
The decline came despite a boost in the number of people forced to move. More than 860,000 delinquent mortgage borrowers lost homes to foreclosure in 2008, about three times as many as in 2005.
More Alaskans moved within the state during 2008 than any other place; 16.3% of them occupied a different house. That increased from 14.6% in 2007.
Oklahoma (15.8%), Nevada (15.7%) and Texas (15.2%) residents also moved around a lot.
New Jersey residents, if they weren't leaving the state altogether, stayed put: 8.2% of them moved within the state during 2008.
There must be something about the Northeast: Only 9.1% of New Yorkers moved within the state, while Rhode Islanders and New Hampshire residents moved at a rate of 9.2%.
Les Christie, CNNMoney.com
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Monday, November 23, 2009
35 million-plus worldwide have dementia
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WASHINGTON - More than 35 million people around the world are living with Alzheimer's disease or other types of dementia, says the most in-depth attempt yet to assess the brain-destroying illness - and it's an ominous forecast as the population grays.
The new count is about 10 percent higher than what scientists had predicted just a few years ago, because earlier research underestimated Alzheimer's growing impact in developing countries.
Barring a medical breakthrough, the World Alzheimer Report projects dementia will nearly double every 20 years. By 2050, it will affect a staggering 115.4 million people, the report concludes.
"We are facing an emergency," said Dr. Daisy Acosta, who heads Alzheimer's Disease International, which released the report Monday.
The U.S. and other developed countries long have been bracing for Alzheimer's to skyrocket. But the report aims to raise awareness of the threat in poorer countries, where finally people are living long enough to face what is mostly a disease of the 65-and-older population.
While age is the biggest driver of Alzheimer's, some of the same factors that trigger heart disease - obesity, high cholesterol, diabetes - seem to increase the risk of dementia, too. Those are problems also on the rise in many developing countries.
In poorer countries, "dementia is a hidden issue," Acosta said, and that's complicating efforts to improve earlier diagnosis. "You're not supposed to talk about it."
For example, the report notes that in India, such terms such as "tired brain" or "weak brain" are used for Alzheimer's symptoms amid widespread belief that dementia is a normal part of aging - when it's not.
That mistake isn't confined to the developing world. Even in Britain, the report found, just over half of the families caring for someone with dementia believed the same thing.
The new study updates global figures last reported in 2005, when British researchers estimated that more than 24 million people were living with dementia. Using that forecast, scientists had expected about 31 million people would be struggling with dementia by 2010.
But since 2005, a flurry of research on Alzheimer's in developing countries has been published, leading Alzheimer's Disease International - a nonprofit federation of more than 70 national groups - to ask those scientists to re-evaluate. After analyzing dozens of studies, the scientists projected 35.6 million cases of dementia worldwide by 2010.
That includes nearly 7 million people in Western Europe, nearly 7 million in South and Southeast Asia, about 5.5 million in China and East Asia and about 3 million in Latin America.
The report puts North America's total at 4.4 million, although the Alzheimer's Association of the U.S. uses a less conservative count to say more than 5 million people in this country alone are affected. The disease afflicts one in eight people 65 and older, and nearly one in two people over 85.
The report forecasts a more than doubling of dementia cases in parts of Asia and Latin America over the next 20 years, compared with a 40 percent to 60 percent jump in Europe and North America.
The report urges the World Health Organization to declare dementia a health priority and for national governments to follow suit. It recommends major new investments in research to uncover what causes dementia and how to slow, if not stop, the creeping brain disease that gradually robs sufferers of their memories and ability to care for themselves, eventually killing them.
There is no known cure; today's drugs only temporarily alleviate symptoms. Scientists aren't even sure what causes Alzheimer's.
But major studies under way now should show within a few years if it's possible to at least slow the progression of Alzheimer's by targeting a gunky substance called beta-amyloid that builds up in patients' brains, noted Dr. William Thies of the U.S. Alzheimer's Association. His group is pushing for an increase in U.S. research spending, from just over $400 million to about $1 billion.
By LAURAN NEERGAARD, AP Medical Writer
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Saturday, November 21, 2009
Scientists See Numbers Inside Peoples Heads
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By carefully analyzing brain activity, scientists can tell what number a person has just seen, research now reveals.
They can similarly tell how many dots a person was presented with.
Past investigations had uncovered brain cells in monkeys that were linked with numbers. Although scientists had found brain regions linked with numerical tasks in humans - the frontal and parietal lobes, to be exact - until now patterns of brain activity linked with specific numbers had proven elusive.
Scientists had 10 volunteers watch either numerals or dots on a screen while a part of their brain known as the intraparietal cortex was scanned - it's a region of the parietal lobe especially linked with numbers. They next rigorously analyzed brain activity to decipher which patterns might be linked with the numbers the volunteers had observed.
When it came to small numbers of dots, the researchers found that brain activity patterns changed gradually in a way that reflected the ordered nature of the numbers. For example, one might be able to conclude that the pattern for six is between that for five and seven.
In the case of the numerals, the researchers could not detect this same gradual change. This suggests their methods simply might not be sensitive enough to detect this progression yet, or that these symbols are in fact coded as more precise, discrete entities in the brain.
"Activation patterns for numbers of dots seem to be stronger - are more easily discriminated - than those for digits, suggesting that maybe still more neurons encode specifically numbers of objects - the evolutionary older representation - than abstract symbolic numbers," said researcher Evelyn Eger at the University of Paris-Sud in Orsay, France.
Given that numbers "are in principle infinite, it is very unlikely that the brain can have, or we can detect, a signature for each number," Eger noted. "There is some hint in our data that smaller numbers have a clearer signature, which may be related to their frequency of occurrence in daily life, but further work would be needed to say something more definite about this and about how the brain deals with larger numbers."
The methods employed in this research could ultimately help unlock how the brain makes sophisticated calculations and how the brain changes as people learn math, the researchers said.
"We are only beginning to access the most basic building blocks that symbolic math probably relies on," Eger said. "We still have no clear idea of how these number representations interact and are combined in mathematical operations, but the fact that we can resolve them in humans gives hope that at some point we can come up with paradigms that let us address this."
The scientists detailed their findings online September 24 in the journal Current Biology.
Charles Q. Choi, Special to LiveScience
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Recession pulls U.S. senior citizens back to work
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WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The worst U.S. economic recession in 70 years is forcing senior citizens out of retirement, leaving them fighting for jobs in a weak labor market or risk homelessness, according to a private study.
The study by Experience Works, released on Tuesday, showed 46 percent of the 2,000 low income people over 55 years who participated needed to find work to keep their homes. Nearly half of them had been searching for work for more than a year.
Experience Works is the nation's largest nonprofit provider of community service, training and employment opportunities for older workers. The study was conducted in the past two months and covered 30 states and Puerto Rico.
"These people are at the age where they understandably thought their job-searching years were behind them," said Cynthia Metzler, president and CEO of Experience Works.
"But here they are, many in their 60s, 70s and beyond, desperate to find work so they can keep a roof over their heads and food on the table."
According to the study, many of the participants had no intention of working past their 60th birthday, but had to change plans after being laid off or following the death of a spouse. Over a third of the participants had retired.
Ninety percent of respondents 76 years and older planned to continue working for the next five years.
Huge medical bills due to a personal illness or that of a spouse were also reasons for coming out of retirement, the survey found. The longest and deepest economic slump since the 1930s is making finding a job for the low-income elderly workers a difficult challenge.
According to Labor Department data, there were 2 million unemployed workers over the age of 55 in August, an increase of 69 percent from the same period last year. Between August 2008 and August this year, the number of unemployed workers 75 years and older increased by 33 percent.
The unemployment rate among workers 55 years and older was 6.7 percent in August after shooting to a record 7.1 percent in July. The national unemployment rate was at 9.7 percent in August, the highest in 26 years.
The Experience Works study found that 46 percent of the elderly jobseekers were sometimes forced to choose between paying rent, buying food or medication. Almost three-quarters believed their age made it harder to compete for jobs with younger workers.
"This study underscores the need to create policies that remove barriers to employment for older workers and provide additional programs and services specifically aimed at helping older people re-enter the work force or remain working," said Metzler.
(Reporting by Lucia Mutikani; Editing by Dan Grebler)
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Friday, November 20, 2009
Study explains bacteria's resistance to antibiotics
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WASHINGTON (AFP) - - A small molecule composed of one atom of oxygen and one of nitrogen plays an important role in helping pathogens resist antibiotics, a new study has found.
The study, led by Evgeny Nudler, professor of biochemistry at New York University Langone Medical Center, and published in Science magazine, provides evidence that nitric oxide (NO) is able to alleviate stress in bacteria caused by many antibiotics and helps it neutralize many antibacterial compounds.
"Developing new medications to fight antibiotic resistant bacteria ... is a huge hurdle, associated with great cost and countless safety issues," Nudler said in a statement.
"Here, we have a short cut, where we don't have to invent new antibiotics. Instead, we can enhance the activity of well established ones, making them more effective at lower doses."
Nitric oxide was initially known as a toxic gas and air pollutant until 1987 when a study that won a Nobel Prize showed that it played a physiological role in mammals.
Nitric oxide has since been found to take part in a range of activities, including learning and memory, blood pressure regulation, penile erection, digestion and the fighting of infection and cancer.
A few years ago, Nudler and his associates demonstrated that harmful bacteria mobilize nitric oxide to defend against the oxidative stress.
The new study from this same group supports the idea that many antibiotics cause the oxidative stress in bacteria, often resulting in their death, whereas nitric oxide counters this effect.
This work suggests scientists could use commercially available inhibitors of nitric oxide-synthase, an enzyme producing nitric oxide in bacteria and humans, to make antibiotic resistant bacteria more sensitive to available drugs.
"We are very excited about the potential impact of this research in terms of continuing to push the boundaries of research in the area of infectious diseases," said Vivian Lee, senior vice president of NYU Langone Medical Center.
"With the emergence of drug resistant bacteria, it's imperative that researchers strive to find conceptually new approaches to fight these pathogens."
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