Medical News Today spoke with Mara Mather about the emotional regulation of older individuals. “A concern I have is that readers may get the impression that older adults, in general, are worse than younger adults at managing their emotion. … To the contrary, previous research indicates that emotional well-being typically improves through adulthood, with the lowest emotional well-being seen among young adults. And in the current study, the older adults felt more empathy and positive emotions when viewing the pictures than younger adults,” she noted. “The brain patterns that the authors focus on do not relate to these age-related positivity effects. Instead, they are associated with individual differences among these older adults.”
Letters successfully encouraged clinicians to check patients’ prescribing records, says study co-author Mireille Jacobson.
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National Geographic interviewed Valter Longo about his research on fasting, fasting-mimicking diets, and how diet affects lifespan and healthspan. “When we talk to centenarians we often hear, ‘You know, we went through moments, through times, where there was just no food at all,’” he says.
Medical News Today featured a study led by Caleb Finch and Max Thorwald on amyloid accumulation in Alzheimer’s versus normal aging. “We were surprised to find extensive overlap between cognitively normal and Alzheimer’s patients for the soluble or non-aggregated form of amyloid proteins,” Thorwald said. “We also found that the precursor to this protein was reduced in Alzheimer’s brains compared to cognitively normal [brains].”
AI-powered analysis developed at USC accurately reflects risk of cognitive decline and Alzheimer’s disease based on brain age.
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STAT quoted Caleb Finch in a story on the apparent links between air pollution and neurodegenerative diseases. “Population-based studies have come into complete agreement on three continents — North America, Western Europe, and Asia — that air pollution above a certain level predicts a higher risk of dementia, particularly Alzheimer’s, and cognitive decline. That’s now proven by at least 10 major studies,” Finch said.
U.S. News & World Report quoted Mireille Jacobson about doctors making safer choices prescribing opioids. “The enduring impacts suggest that the letters encouraged engagement among clinicians who would not have otherwise created PMP accounts or searched the PMP. This finding is noteworthy because account creation is an important barrier to PMP use,” Jacobson said.
Good Day LA 5AM highlighted research by Andrei Irimia of USC Leonard Davis that used artificial intelligence to tell how fast the brain is aging.
Science Blog featured a study led by Andrei Irimia on measuring brain age and dementia risk. “Our study harnesses the power of deep learning to identify areas of the brain that are aging in ways that reflect a cognitive decline that may lead to Alzheimer’s,” Irimia said. “People age at different rates, and so do tissue types in the body. We know this colloquially when we say, ‘So-and-so is forty, but looks thirty. The same idea applies to the brain. The brain of a forty-year-old may look as ‘young’ as the brain of a thirty-year-old, or it may look as ‘old’ as that of a sixty-year-old.” The study was also covered in Neuroscience News, StudyFinds, AZO Robotics, Yahoo Notícias (Brazil), and El Debate (Spain).
Increase in amyloid beta protein in the brain, often thought to be directly involved in Alzheimer’s pathology, may instead be a general change that occurs with age even in healthy brains, says senior author Caleb Finch.
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- “Achieving Abundance in Eldercare” Report Maps Challenges and Opportunities in Ensuring Care for California’s Older Adults
- Study: Shingles Vaccine Linked to Slower Biological Aging in Older Adults
- Study: Email Reminders Boost Use of Database for Safe Prescribing
- More Than Just Genes: Many Factors Affect How Fast We Age
- A Half-Century of Vision: 50 Years of the USC Leonard Davis School
