AARP Eye Center
)
Instead of leaning on each other in their golden years, divorced parents may lean more heavily on grown children for care and support. Experts say adults whose parents are divorced should be prepared for the extra time and financial demands that aging and unmarried parents could require.
We've all had them -- those people in our Facebook news feeds whose political updates we find abhorrent or stupid or just plain irritating. But with Election 2012 drawing nigh, such updates seem to have increased tenfold, leaving us with that mighty modern quandary: To block or not to block? Or perhaps even - gasp - to unfriend altogether?
A new report from the UK finds that when it comes to treating alcohol-related ailments, middle-aged patients cost England's National Health Service 10 times more than younger adults.
Anyone who's watched more than a few episodes of Law & Order knows how easy it is to unwittingly get a sample of someone's DNA -- a discarded coffee cup, a used Kleenex, a few stray hairs and you're good to go. In Dick Wolf's world, such samples are used to catch the bad guys (or exonerate the good guys), but in real life, genetic code can reveal a variety of information, including what diseases may lurk in someone's future. This type of genetic testing -- known as whole genome sequencing -- has many useful applications. But a report released today by the presidential bioethics commission reveals that many legal issues surrounding genetic privacy have yet to be addressed.
A study published yesterday in the Archives of Internal Medicine shows many prescription drugs could have a longer shelf life than assumed, in some cases much longer. But while the results could have important implications for drug companies, researchers are quick to caution consumers against applying the findings to their own medicine cabinets.
"You get to fall asleep with the rocking of the waves and the wind, and with the Internet, you can home-office from just about anywhere," says Ian Morton, an American semi-retiree who spends half the year on a houseboat outside Montreal, Canada. Morton, 51, one of several "rambling retirees" profiled by Reuters in a piece on boomers who are bucking the "aging in place" trend. Though exact stats are hard to come by, evidence points to a growing number of grown-ups trading houses and retirement communities for houseboats, RVs and strangers' sofas.
President Barack Obama and GOP candidate Mitt Romney donned their blue and red ties, respectively, and took to the stage Wednesday evening for the first presidential debate of Election 2012. With little more than a month before Election Day, it was interesting to finally see the two men come face to face. In the 90-minute televised debate broadcast from Denver, Obama and Romney covered ample issues of import to older adults, including Medicare, Medicaid, health care reform and Social Security.
Add this to the approximately 8 billion benefits of omega-3 fatty acids: They could help preserve DNA segments known as telomeres, whose degradation is a key marker of aging. Shorter telomeres are associated with age-related decline, cancer and a higher risk of death (in one study of people over 60, those with shorter telomeres were three times more likely to die from heart disease and eight times more likely to die from an infectious disease). But according to Ohio State University scientists, taking omega-3 fatty acid supplements (such as fish oil pills) can help lengthen telomeres in middle-aged and older adults.
A geriatrician known for his work reducing hospital readmissions, Eric Coleman is among the 23 men and women revealed yesterday as recipients of the 2012 MacArthur fellowships. Nicknamed the MacArthur "genius grants," these fellowships from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation come with an award of $100,000 per year for five years, no strings attached.
The global population of over-60-year-olds will reach one billion within the decade, according to the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA). In a new report, the organization warns that discrimination, abuse and violence against older adults -- and especially older women -- are still common, even in wealthy industrialized nations.