Healthy Aging: Body, Mind & Spirit

What is Fibromyalgia?

1. Fibromyalgia is not a form of arthritis.   Fibromyalgia and arthritis are completely different disorders.   Fibromyalgia is defined as an illness that causes chronic pain in muscles and ligaments.   Arthritis is defined as an inflammation of the joints.
2. Over the past 10+ years, no evidence has been found to prove that fibromyalgia causes permanent muscle or joint damage.    According to the most recent research, the chronic pain characteristic of fibromyalgia is caused by a malfunction in the central nervous system.
3. Fibromyalgia patients consist mostly of women  over age 40, but it can also affect men, young women, and children.
4. There’s no scientific evidence that fibromyalgia is inherited through family genes.
5. Fibromyalgia is not easy to test for. Unlike arthritis, which has physical symptoms that are obvious to the trained eye, fibromyalgia’s symptoms are less clear-cut.    Most fibromyalgia patients will feel fatigue and have muscle pain, but these symptoms are not identifiable through lab tests.

New developments in melanoma treatment

A new drug may change the landscape of melanoma treatment, offering patients an option that goes far beyond anything previously used against skin cancer.    Tests in people whose melanoma had spread, show this new drug was able to shrink tumors in most patients and, in a few cases, even wiped the growths out, scientists report in the Aug. 26 New England Journal of Medicine.

Wondering when to retire?

I know for most of us this isn’t an issue, but check out the latest on the BEST age to retire at! Apparently, retirements that occur at culturally and institutionally expected ages yield large dividends in terms of well-being.

Green leafy vegetables may reduce diabetes risk

A diet rich in green leafy vegetables may reduce your risk of developing diabetes, UK research reports.    In an analysis of six studies into fruit and vegetable intake, only foods like broccoli, cauliflower, spinach and cabbage were found to have a significant positive effect.

It is not clear why green leafy vegetables may have a protective effect, but one reason may be they are high in antioxidants, such as vitamin C and another theory is that they contain high levels of magnesium.

My own theory is if you fill up on healthy fruits and vegetables, you’ll be much less likely to eat those nasty processed foods full of too much salt, sugar and fat!

Positive thinking, my thoughts…

“I changed my mind and now it works better!”

I’ve been thinking a lot about positive thinking lately.   I’m not talking about those who ascribe to the pathologically optimistic worldview of “The Secret.”    No, I do not believe focusing on something in the proper way, makes it come true.   If that were true, how many of us would still be living in our present circumstances?

I abhor that simplistic way of viewing life, because it blames the rest of us dumb schmucks for not being smart enough to learn how to focus our energies in the right way.   In other words, blaming the victim.

On the other hand, I see no advantages to negative thinking, what I fondly call “worry shopping.”     My favor saying when it comes to pre-worrying everything in your life is:    It’s like paying interest on a loan you may never have to take out. That’s no way to live!

I believe there truly is something in between these two extremes, and that something does actually work for me.    For example, my husband Mike is having a big, scary back surgery next week.    He is scared and for very good reasons.   However, this surgery is the only way to fix a congenital problem with his lower back which has caused all sorts of long-term disability and pain.   I have thoroughly researched the problem and the surgeon.   We have definitely hired the best around.

It is natural to worry, but does it help in any way?    One thing I have learned from my 55 years on this earth is that WE DO CHOOSE what we focus on.   Let’s call it conscious thought control.    So, this morning I tried some positive visioning with Mike.   I tried to “change his mind.”    I ask him to imagine having no more pain in his back, wrist and leg, so he could move around like when he was ten again, feeling light and carefree.    Since we all have a choice, why not focus on how great we are going to feel later instead of giving up before the surgery even begins?

Another example comes to mind.    So many of us would like to find love at least once in this lifetime.    That’s why I started my own version of a dating service back in 2004 for those 40+.    What’s the main problem when people start dating again?   Besides having a gigantic and completely unrealistic wish list, most do not even believe they will find someone they can love.    If you assume from the beginning that you are pursuing an impossible goal, why bother?    No wonder it all feel hopeless and stupid!

First we must acknowledge that not one of us truly knows what will happen to us today.   Positive thinking is simply focusing on what you hope will happen instead of worrying about all the scary versions of  “what might happen.”   It is deciding not to worry constantly about everything bad, and instead focusing on all of the potentially great things coming your way.

It is a conscious decision to live in love not fear, and the most important choice we make every moment of our lives.

Important new studies on HRT and breast cancer revealed

This is a complicated issue depending on what age you start, what type of HRT you use (only estrogen or both hormones, bioidentical versus Prempro) delivered to your body in what form (patch or pill), your BMI, and how long you choose to be on HRT.

This recent study tried to analyze these various factors.   Read it very carefully to understand all of the ins and outs of this issue.   I have chosen to use the Vivelle estrogen-only patch for the past few years and LOVE it!   This recent research did not change my mind.   I plan to use it a year or two more and then quit.

How you feel about others is a good indicator of how you feel about yourself

How positively you see others is linked to how happy, kind-hearted and emotionally stable you are, according to new research by a Wake Forest University psychology professor.

“Your perceptions of others reveal so much about your own personality,” says Dustin Wood, assistant professor of psychology at Wake Forest and lead author of the study, about his findings. By asking study participants to each rate positive and negative characteristics of just three people, the researchers were able to find out important information about the rater’s well-being, mental health, social attitudes and how they were judged by others.

The study appears in the July issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. Peter Harms at the University of Nebraska and Simine Vazire of Washington University in St. Louis co-authored the study.

The researchers found a person’s tendency to describe others in positive terms is an important indicator of the positivity of the person’s own personality traits. They discovered particularly strong associations between positively judging others and how enthusiastic, happy, kind-hearted, courteous, emotionally stable and capable the person describes oneself and is described by others.

“Seeing others positively reveals our own positive traits,” Wood says.

The study also found that how positively you see others shows how satisfied you are with your own life, and how much you are liked by others.

In contrast, negative perceptions of others are linked to higher levels of narcissism and antisocial behavior. “A huge suite of negative personality traits are associated with viewing others negatively,” Wood says. “The simple tendency to see people negatively indicates a greater likelihood of depression and various personality disorders.”

Given that negative perceptions of others may underlie several personality disorders, finding techniques to get people to see others more positively could promote the cessation of behavior patterns associated with several different personality disorders simultaneously, Wood says.

This research suggests that when you ask someone to rate the personality of a particular coworker or acquaintance, you may learn as much about the rater providing the personality description as the person they are describing. The level of negativity the rater uses in describing the other person may indeed indicate that the other person has negative characteristics, but may also be a tip off that the rater is unhappy, disagreeable, neurotic — or has other negative personality traits.

Raters in the study consisted of friends rating one another, college freshmen rating others they knew in their dormitories, and fraternity and sorority members rating others in their organization. In all samples, participants rated real people and how positive their ratings were associated directly with the participant’s own characteristics.

By evaluating the raters and how they evaluated their peers again one year later, Wood found compelling evidence that how positively we tend to perceive others in our social environment is a highly stable trait that does not change substantially over time.

Studies of good bacteria versus bad bacteria

Bacteria has a bad rap in our culture.    But, as much as we all participate in the war against germs — from antibacterial soaps to hand sanitizers — even the cleanest of us still carry about ten bacterial cells for every human cell.    And most of these germs are actually healthy bacteria.

Indeed, some scientists believe the loss of friendly organisms in recent years could be contributing to rising rates of asthma, acid reflux, obesity, and some cancers.

Bacterial colonies are necessary for the digestive and immune systems to work properly, and vice versa, said microbiologist Jeffrey Weiser of the University of Pennsylvania.   “In some ways the bacteria are maintaining us to promote their own existence.”

Part of the decline of good bacteria can be attributed to use of antibiotics, especially in children.   But a recent study found huge differences in bacteria present on the skin of newborns delivered by C-section vs. those delivered vaginally, possibly explaining why C-section babies are more vulnerable to infections.   The infants were swabbed and tested moments after birth, yet those delivered by C-section were already colonized.

“They’re like magnets,” said Maria Dominguez-Bello, who led the study. She said she’s not sure where the bacteria are coming from, but she and her colleagues are now following a larger group of infants over time.   The C-section babies were colonized mostly by staphylococcus, a type of skin bacteria that sometimes causes infections.   The other babies were colonized by species similar to those living in their mothers’ vaginas.

Previous studies have shown that babies delivered by C-section are more vulnerable to infection with the antibiotic-resistant staph strain known as MRSA, but the reason has been unclear.   The bacterial differences may also be connected to another mystery: why C-section babies are more likely to get asthma later on.   “We believe there is so much we acquire very early and they live with us forever,” said Dominguez-Bello.

The C-section study, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, is part of a larger effort to study the way modern lifestyles and medicine have altered and perhaps disrupted humans’ natural microbial communities.    To get the “before” picture, Dominguez-Bello is studying natives of the Venezuelan Amazon.

One of the big differences found so far is that almost everyone in the Amazon has the bacteria Helicobacter pylori, once known mainly for causing stomach ulcers. Before the 20th century, H. pylori was the dominant organism in human stomachs around the world, said New York University biologist Martin Blaser.   About 70 percent of Americans born near the beginning of the 20th century carried H. pylori, Blaser said.    Among children born in the 21st century, it’s 6 percent.

H. pylori is being eradicated by antibiotics prescribed for childhood ear infections, sore throats, and a host of other conditions, he said.   That might mean ulcers and stomach cancers become much less common, but people without H. pylori are more likely to be diagnosed with esophageal reflux and cancer of the esophagus.   They also appear to get more asthma in childhood.

“An H. pylori-positive stomach is different from an H. pylori-negative one,” Blaser said. “There’s a cost to having it, but there’s also a cost to not having it.”   Over the last century, asthma has risen at roughly the same rate that H. pylori has fallen, although a mechanism linking the two has yet to be discovered.

Obesity may also have a bacterial connection. In 2006, biologist Jeffrey Gordon of Washington University in St. Louis and colleagues published a groundbreaking paper showing that obese people had a different mix of gut bacteria than thin people.   Blaser suspects H. pylori may play an important role in the stomach.   It influences two key appetite hormones: ghrelin, which makes us want to eat, and leptin, which makes us want to stop eating.

“It’s well-known that farmers used to give antibiotics to animals to fatten them up,” said Blaser, even before antibiotics were used to prevent infections. If it fattened up chickens, geese, turkeys, pigs, and cattle, he thinks it’s reasonable to explore the possibility that antibiotic use and the loss of H. pylori are helping fatten up today’s humans.

Blaser said he was surprised how long it had taken the medical community to catch on to the importance of beneficial microbes.   One reason is that they were mostly invisible, said Rob Knight, a computational biologist at the University of Colorado and a collaborator on the C-section study.   Until a few years ago, the only way to find microorganisms in the body was to place a sample of tissue or fluid in a petri dish and see what grew.   Now scientists can use various types of “DNA fingerprinting” to identify hundreds of species even if they don’t grow outside the body.    As many as 97 percent of the species inhabiting humans may have been previously undetectable.

Lately, it’s become cheap to read out the organisms’ whole genetic code through what’s called DNA sequencing.   That has enabled Knight to begin compiling a sort of atlas of human microbes called the Human “Microbiome” Project — an effort analogous to last decade’s Human Genome Project.

So far, it has shown that surprisingly different communities of organisms live on various parts of the body — our forearms are colonized by bugs not usually found in our armpits, which are again different from what’s in our navels.

In a paper published in March, Knight demonstrated how people leave unique bacterial fingerprints on objects they touch.   These might be used the same way that police use human DNA or actual fingerprints at crime scenes.

A number of other researchers are exploring how good microbes might protect against bad diseases.

Penn biologist Frederic Bushman is studying a possible connection between gut microbes and inflammatory bowel disease (IBD), a group of sometimes debilitating intestinal disorders that include Crohn’s disease.   Bushman believes scientists are just beginning to uncover a complicated system of cross talk between immune systems and the communities of microbes that live in them.

“One thing people don’t realize is the importance of immune tone,” he said.   By this, he explained, he means the way your immune system is always on — even when you’re not sick with some infectious agent.   Instead of sitting there doing nothing, immune cells are responding to their surrounding community of microbes — “actively sculpting the composition of those communities in your body,” he said.

An even newer field of science is beginning to look beyond the human microbiome to the community of human viruses — our viromes. The bacteria that people carry around are themselves carrying viruses, Bushman said — worlds embedded within worlds.

Dangerous supplements to be aware of

We Americans do love our dietary supplements. More than half of the adult population have taken them to stay healthy, lose weight, gain an edge in sports or in the bedroom, and avoid using prescription drugs. In 2009, we spent $26.7 billion on them, according to the Nutrition Business Journal, a trade publication.

What consumers might not realize, though, is that supplement manufacturers routinely, and legally, sell their products without first having to demonstrate that they are safe and effective. The Food and Drug Administration has not made full use of even the meager authority granted it by the industry-friendly 1994 Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act (DSHEA).

Read about 12 supplements to avoid and why.