Category: Longevity News 2014

9/12/2104 - Elderly New Yorkers, Here for the Duration

It used to be that New Yorkers of a certain age reflexively said goodbye to all this — the traffic, the tumult, the long lines and the incomparable bagels — and headed south or west for their sunset years. No longer. Around town these days there are many more than 50 shades of gray. According… Read more 9/12/2104 - Elderly New Yorkers, Here for the Duration

9/11/2014 - More seniors are carrying student loan debt into retirement

Student loan debt doesn’t only hurt the young. More seniors are carrying their college debt into retirement. The total outstanding debt load held by seniors grew to $18.2 billion in 2013, up from $2.8 billion in 2005, according to a report released by the Government Accountability Office on Wednesday. The share of households headed by… Read more 9/11/2014 - More seniors are carrying student loan debt into retirement

9/11/2014 - Scientists Find Fruit Fly Gene That May Delay Aging

A team of biologists from UCLA announced they’ve discovered a gene that could be used to slow aging and lead to longer life. In lab studies conducted in fruit flies, the scientists identified a cellular mechanism for boosting the body’s ability to flush out the cellular debris linked to many age-related diseases. Read the full… Read more 9/11/2014 - Scientists Find Fruit Fly Gene That May Delay Aging

9/10/2014 - A Simple Equation: More Education = More Income

Imagine if the United States government taxed the nation’s one-percenters so that their post-tax share of the nation’s income remained at 10 percent, roughly where it was in 1979. If the excess money were distributed equally among the rest of the population, in 2012 every family below that very top tier would have gotten a… Read more 9/10/2014 - A Simple Equation: More Education = More Income

9/9/2014 - Dementia patients continue to get medications with little, no benefit

More than half of nursing home patients who suffer severe dementia and are likely to die within a year or two are administered medications that offer little to no benefit and may cause pointless discomfort, a new study finds. Read the full article at Los Angeles Times.

9/7/2014 - Seniors boost number of veterans deemed unemployable

Senior citizens have helped make the benefit known as individual unemployability one of the fastest-growing expenditures in the VA disability system. The number of “unemployable” veterans has nearly tripled since 2000, to 321,451, with the majority at ages when most people have already stopped working. Government data show that 56% of the beneficiaries are at… Read more 9/7/2014 - Seniors boost number of veterans deemed unemployable

9/5/2014 - Encouraging End-of-Life Talks

There is reason to hope that a degree of sanity may be returning to the touchy issue of advance planning for medical care at the end of life. Just five years ago, Republican politicians, Sarah Palin prominent among them, were falsely charging that President Obama’s health care reforms would create “death panels” that could cut… Read more 9/5/2014 - Encouraging End-of-Life Talks

9/3/2014 - Is Aging In Place A Pipe Dream?

Housing is the linchpin of our well-being, according to the AARP Foundation and the Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies which held the conference in conjunction with the release of a new report, Housing America’s Older Adults—Meeting the Needs of An Aging Population. The experts explored the mismatch between the nation’s housing stock and Americans’… Read more 9/3/2014 - Is Aging In Place A Pipe Dream?

9/2/2014 - Childhood Diet Habits Set in Infancy, Studies Suggest

Efforts to improve what children eat should begin before they even learn to walk, a series of nutritional studies published on Tuesday has found. Taken together, the data indicate that infant feeding patterns persist far longer than has been appreciated. Read the full article at The New York Times.

9/2/2014 - The Next Housing Crisis: Aging Americans' Homes

There’s another potential housing crisis coming and this one won’t be a collapse in home values. The nation is facing a lack of affordable, physically-accessible and well-located homes for America’s aging population — especially those with low incomes, according to a new, gloomy study released today by the Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies &… Read more 9/2/2014 - The Next Housing Crisis: Aging Americans' Homes