Everything Changes as You Age
I am going to put my gerontology hat on right now so we can discuss how your body changes as you age. This might not be new information to you, but unless you understand what is happening naturally to your body (which you can see), you will have a difficult time understanding what is happening to your brain (which you can’t see!) as you age. You may be surprised to find out how early these aging changes are occurring.
These are the signs of aging:
Our hair may begin to thin in our 20s. Gray hair appears in our 30s or 40s but by the time we are in our 70s our hair is most likely completely gray.
Weight appears in all the wrong places. Women usually gain weight in their hips and thighs, while men develop ‘beer bellies’ or ‘love handles’.
During our 40s our skin begins to sag and lose elasticity. Wrinkles become more prominent.
Flexibility begins to decline in our mid-20s, and muscle strength declines in our late 30s or early 40s. As muscle mass and strength decline, we burn calories less efficiently and store food as fat more easily.
Our eye lens changes shape and becomes thicker and less pliable, making it more difficult to see close objects. By age 50, nearly everyone requires glasses to read the newspaper.
Our sense of taste diminishes as we age.
Our mouths and eyes may become dryer.
Our bones lose calcium and become more brittle. Women, more than men, lose bone density, especially after menopause.
In our 70s, we lose height when thinning vertebrae shrink.
(Fitness After 50)
Feeling old right about now? Aging is characterized by a slow loss of capacity in all our body systems beginning in early childhood and progressing throughout our adult lives. These changes in themselves usually do not cause physical decline or a loss of independence. But my goodness, don’t we want to slow these changes as much as possible and continue to function on a high level no matter what our chronological age? If we lead a sedentary lifestyle we can actually accelerate this aging process.
We experience changes in our body composition as we get older. These body changes include: both total and relative amounts of fat, muscle, vital organs and bone. Should we be fortunate enough to maintain our body weight between the ages of 30 and 70, the amount of muscle decreases and fat increases. This accelerated loss of muscle affects the efficiency of our metabolism and prevents the body from burning fuel efficiently. As we age, we have less muscle to burn energy and so we store fat. This decrease in muscle and an increase in fat are responsible for much of the weight gain that occurs with aging.
Although these changes occur as part of normal aging, much of the age-related changes in body composition are due to an inactive lifestyle rather than normal aging. The extra weight that we can pick up with aging can contribute to serious health issues: diabetes, cause or worsen high cholesterol, or even high blood pressure.
Now I want to focus on some aging changes that have a direct impact on brain function. Hearing is a very big aging issue. Hearing loss may affect over one-third of adults between the ages of 65-74. One-half of adults between the ages of 75-79 years old experience hearing loss. This condition declines with aging but there seems to be some ingrained belief that only old people have hearing loss. So there is real push-back in wearing a hearing aid. Untreated hearing loss can cause an increase in cognitive load. That means that the brain is working especially hard to figure out what you heard. This causes the processing speed of the brain to slow down and eventually can stop the communication process altogether. This sounds brutal and it is. Hearing is a very important pathway for information to get into the brain. A clear signal is crucial for brain function and memory formation. Ego shouldn’t put you at a high risk for developing dementia.
Vision is the next aging issue to be addressed. Sight does diminish as we age. The most common type of vision decline is presbyopia or the need for reading glasses. To be able to focus on close objects, the lens must increase in thickness. As we age the flexibility of the lens decreases and we are not able to correct our vision to see objects close up. Tear production declines; the pupil becomes smaller not allowing as much light to reach the lens – so objects don’t seem as bright. We have trouble adjusting to lighting differences – from bright light to a poorly lit room. Do you feel like you are blinded when you walk from the bright outside into a dark restaurant? I always get a little anxious that I won’t be able to see a step or an upward grade and fall flat on my face! That’s not a good sign if you are just entering the establishment!
A more persistent problem and one that can be dangerous is the inability to see clearly at night. Driving in the dark is perilous and walking on a dark street can be risky. Clear vision sends clear messages to the brain. If our vision is impaired our brain function can decline. Vision is a powerful pathway for memory formation. We need to send clear visual signals to our brain.
Cardiovascular endurance is the ability of our body to take up and efficiently use oxygen. The better our endurance, the better our bodies work. Lung capacity declines modestly with age and the heart’s pumping function also declines. The work of the heart is a product of heart rate and the amount of blood pumped by each heartbeat. Maximum heart rate (the highest rate at which the heart will beat) show noticeable decline in aging. A more important cause of the decline in work efficiency is the loss of muscle mass that occurs with aging. Loss of muscle mass seems as important as any change in heart function in lowering the efficiency with which we use oxygen. Less oxygen-rich blood is being pumped from the heart, and there is less muscle for extracting and burning oxygen efficiently. Remember that 25% of the blood, oxygen and carbohydrates from each heartbeat go directly to the brain for energy and nutrition. If our cardiovascular system is impaired our brain suffers as a direct result. Our bodies are miraculous though. If we maintain a high level of physical activity, we can regain much of our work capacity. Our bodies function better and our brain rewards us by also functioning better.
I will talk about the specific losses and risks the brain sustains from inactivity as we age in the next blog. I concentrate so much on brain function that I don’t paint the whole picture sometimes. We are whole beings – body, mind and spirit. The declines we experience with aging can be controlled by our lifestyle. This goes for the body but it especially goes for the brain. Aging happens. We can gracefully age and function independently into an extended lifetime or we can accelerate aging changes by the lifestyle we live. Guess what? We choose. What do you choose?
Ettinger,W.H., Mitchell,B.S., Blair, S.N. (1996). Fitness after 50; it’s never too late to start. Beverly Cracom Publications. St. Louis, MO.