While I do not always write about them, at any given point in time I generally have one or two “mini-perseverations” going on (for lack of a better phrase). Usually they involve something along the lines of, say, ingredients labels (pertaining to some specific product or another; in the past it was vitamins, currently it’s cat food!), or different types of electrical outlets.

Lately, though, I have developed a bit of a fixation on “before and after” pictures — in particular, before and after pictures of room interiors. There is just something tremendously fascinating to me about taking the same space and making it look completely different, just by changing the “trimmings” or parts of the structure. And I have also always had sort of a “thing” about wanting space to be used well. When a room is “wrong” I find it very hard to do much of anything in it, whether because there’s something sense-scrambling about the configuration or because things are just laid out in a way that makes organizing things logically really hard, if not impossible.

(That said, I have to also note that I despise rearranging furniture for the mere sake of rearranging. I used to go into something of a panic as a child, when my mother did this. Once I have stuff where it ought to be, I tend to leave it there!)

Anyway, I was going through some photos today and realized I had a few interesting before-and-after shots of parts of my house. And because this blog has definitely become, shall we say, a bit eclectic lately (ever since I stopped worrying about making each post Profoundly Important And In Service Of Some Lofty Larger Goal, not that there’s anything wrong with blogging that way, but attempting to do so was giving me massive writer’s block in my case), I figured I might as well post them here. So if you are also into this sort of thing, enjoy!

This was how the part of the kitchen nearest to the living room looked when we first saw the house (prior to actually moving in). There had clearly been a lot of staging done (everything had been very recently covered with bright white paint, and select pieces of the original owner’s antique furniture had been artfully arranged throughout the rooms). And there were definitely aspects of the “before” configuration that appealed to me and helped highlight some of the house’s assets.

However, after some thought about how we would actually want to use the space, Matt and I determined that the open shelving would more than likely just end up attracting “dust collectors”, and that the little shuttered cabinets wouldn’t be very efficient from a storage standpoint. Moreover, the “breakfast bar”/extra cabinetry between the kitchen and living room was sort of a weird, kludgey thing (clearly NOT original to the house) that butted up against part of one of the large picture-window sliders on the right side wall of the house, and we wanted a more open floor plan.

Then there was the matter of the cabinets themselves. Originally we planned on keeping them — but that was before we did a closer inspection, and found that they were actually not in the best of shape under the white paint. The doors were made of some sort of particle board covered with very thin plastic 1970s dark-woodgrain veneer, and the cabinet “boxes” themselves had a lot of warping, staining, and other miscellaneous damage. The drawers also had no slider tracks; they were just wood-on-wood, prone to sticking, etc. Hence, once we tallied things up, neither of us figured we were very attached to the existing cabinets, and as they were definitely not original to the house (which was built in 1954) Matt and I deemed they had to go.

AFTER:

The above image shows approximately the same area as in the “before” picture, from a similar angle. Notice that the dust-collector shelves and tiny shuttered cabinets are gone now and have been replaced with a floor-to-ceiling built-in pantry. The “breakfast bar”/weird kludgey wall-thing (which, incidentally, also contained some 70s-era speakers!) is gone as well. And there is also a little “nook” to the left of the pantry which was originally sort of a “dimensional artifact” but which turned out to be a perfect spot for the microwave cart.

As for the cabinets themselves, Matt and I considered all kinds of options and styles (custom, stock, Ikea, Home Depot, etc.) before finally settling on custom shaker style doors and boxes, which were to be built primarily of maple by a brother of one of Matt’s co-workers who also happened to be a carpenter.

Luckily, Matt and I have fairly compatible tastes in decor, but as I am sure he (Matt) would tell you, I am a lot more opinionated about such things and can be, well, a bit of a zealot at times. For instance, I cannot even count the number of times I reiterated the “NO RAISED PANELS!” mantra, and the number of cabinet styles (in various catalogs and such we looked at) I denounced as “utterly hideous and incongruous with the house”, etc. (Maybe this side of me doesn’t come out much on the blog, but trust me, I can be quite the critic when it comes to certain topics!)

What it really came down to for me was that I wanted something that “worked” in a midcentury ranch home (as in, did not produce the “tutu on a bulldog” effect that a lot of thoughtlessly generic remodels tend to have on such houses — see here for an example of what I definitely did NOT want), that would be durable and long-lasting, and that would overall be easy to look at (in addition, of course, to the functional consideration of providing efficient and ample storage space).

Matt basically wanted the same things I did but was less concerned about the kitchen “matching the house”, and he was a lot more averse to going the streamlined modern route than I was.

So I am thankful we were able to finally settle on the shaker style — Matt is very much a “craftsman” sort of guy, and the cabinets we ended up with certainly respect that, and I am happy both because of the historical connection between shaker-style and later modernist styles and because it just plain looks nice.

One thing we also did, that (apparently) is somewhat unusual is keep the natural woodgrain exposed on the doors but paint the cabinet “boxes” and face frames a sage green color (Valspar “Cactus Shadow”, to be precise). I wanted SOME color in the kitchen and Matt and I are both fond of green, so while I would have preferred something a bit darker (for more contrast) I daresay the end result turned out quite pleasant to look at. And honestly I would love to see more examples of kitchens with natural-wood cabinet doors but with painted face-frames; so far I haven’t even been able to find one (though it could just be my search-fu is failing me in this instance), other than ours.

This view shows the middle of the kitchen, the sink area and part of the area along the rear wall (including the back door, out to the yard). Note all the WHITE, the washing machine along the rear wall, and the chandelier (which caused some literal headaches to several folks, including me, before it was removed — it was hanging down so low that I kept getting “wrought iron to the forehead”, ouch!).

AFTER:

This view again shows the middle of the kitchen, the sink area and part of the area along the rear wall, but now many changes are evident. The most major thing was the addition of the large island in the center, which contains both storage underneath (more cabinets) and a large food prep surface that overhangs on one side, where we could presumably put stools or tall chairs, in effect making the island double as an eating area. We wanted to keep things simple and versatile so the island is actually a free-standing unit (as in, it isn’t rooted to the floor, and contains no plumbing or electrical lines). Partly this was for budgetary reasons and partly it was just because we liked the idea of having the island be like a piece of furniture rather than a built-in.

Note as well that the washing machine is gone (we still don’t have it hooked up elsewhere yet, but hopefully that will happen soon; for now we are partaking of the laundromat conveniently located a few blocks away). The stove is now a gas stove (Matt has always wanted a gas stove, and he is definitely the cook around here), and the refrigerator we just got in tones that would match the stove. Neither is a particularly “special” piece, but we had a budget to work within and I figured we were better off “splurging” on the cabinets than on appliances, as appliances are a lot more easily replaced if necessary.

But so far they’ve certainly been serviceable, and I definitely think the black-and-stainless-steel tones help prevent the overall aesthetic from veering too far into “country cottage” territory. The fume hood is also new and rather a nice model, and it adds (what to me is) a dash of “restaurant kitchen”-ness to the space, which is not a bad thing. (I also designed the ducting on top myself, which was necessary because of the way the studs in the wall were placed).

And then of course there is the floor. I am SO happy with the floor — it is marmoleum! MUCH nicer than the blah grayish-white 1980s vinyl that we started out with there. I had a lot of fun coming up with a pattern for the Marmoleum and determining on that basis how much of each color we would need (we used “Eucalyptus” squares and “Barbados” planks, both in the “click panel” type). It was really easy to install, too…Matt and I did it in one day with just the two of us.

The new cabinets over the sink are pretty much positioned the same as the old ones were — that aspect of the old layout at least made sense. We also kept the original sink (which I think might very well be original to the house — it’s a very nice, if slightly endearingly chipped, cast-iron model with one shallower side and one deep side) and the white tile counter by the sink, which is not original but which is perfectly serviceable and doesn’t clash horribly with the rest of the decor.

The white dishwasher is also still there but now I rather wish we’d gotten rid of it, as we have never actually used it and probably won’t. I actually prefer hand-washing dishes — if I put stuff in the dishwasher most likely I would forget about it. I would like to take the dishwasher out at some point and perhaps make a little cubby thing for the trash cans, but that’s not on the immediate agenda.

Initially the living room looked a lot more “formal” (though that was partly due to staging), and the gray carpeting made everything look smaller. Plus the all-white walls were just boring. It looked “nice”, but wasn’t very “us” (that is, me and Matt).

Living room AFTER:

I’ve already posted this picture once before so apologies for that, but it was the best one I could find in what I’d uploaded showing the whole living room. Ripping up the carpet had a huge effect on the space — made it look so much bigger! Plus the floors, while very dirty initially (from decades of fine dust filtering through the carpeting) turned out to be beautiful solid oak in excellent condition overall. We did not even need to strip and refinish; we just mopped and mopped and then applied some wax.

And then there is my brown wall. I love the brown wall so very much. I have always been a big fan of dark/bold wall colors, and was SO tired of imposed apartment-rental White Everywhere. I love the contrast between the brown wall and white fireplace especially, and I think overall that color being there adds some very pleasing “weight” to the kitchen/living room space, as the kitchen is very light-and-bright even though it’s not all white anymore.

I am also finding that my own sense of what I want the place to look like has been shifting around in light of all kinds of factors, and at this point I am leaning strongly towards an “eclectic” look rather than one constrained into any particular design “school” or era. For one thing, I certainly cannot afford to have everything “matching”, and even if I could, it seems like it would be very wasteful to get rid of and replace so much of what I already have that is wholly functional. Moreover, if you think about it, it’s not like everyone living in ranch homes in the 1950s and 1960s ONLY had mid-mod furniture…presumably plenty of folks had hand-me-down pieces from the 1940s or 30s or even before, and hence the reality of those houses back then probably was more eclectic than matchy-matchy.

However, at the same time, I definitely want to maintain a sense of respect for the house’s “lines” and overall design (meaning, at some point that awful 1980s “seashell” sink in the bathroom HAS to go!).

Existence is Wonderful

The first hint comes from the Mayo Clinic’s Darren Baker. Baker has developed a way of delaying symptoms of old age in mice, and has even been able to reverse some signs of aging in already aged mice. Here’s more:

Baker has developed a way of killing all of a mouse’s senescent cells by feeding them with a specific drug. When he did that in middle age, he gave the mice many more healthy years. He delayed the arrival of cataracts in their eyes, put off the weakening of their muscles, and held back the loss of their body fat. He even managed to reverse some of these problems by removing senescent cells from mice that had already grown old. There is a lot of work to do before these results could be applied to humans, but for now, Baker has shown that senescent cells are important players in the ageing process.

Note that the mice in this study didn’t live any longer; they just spent more of their life being healthy.

Baker exploited the fact that many senescent cells rely on a protein called p16-Ink4a. He created a genetic circuit that reacts to the presence of p16-Ink4a by manufacturing an executioner: a protein called caspase-8 that kills its host cell. Caspase-8 is like a pair of scissors – it comes in two halves that only work when they unite. Baker could link the two halves together using a specific drug. By sneaking the drug into a mouse’s food, he activated the executioners, which only killed off the cells that have lots of p16-Ink4a. Only the senescent ones get the chop.

Baker tested out this system in a special strain of genetically engineered mice that age very quickly. It worked. The senescent cells disappeared, and that substantially delayed the onset of muscle loss, cataracts, and fat loss. Typically, around half of these mice show signs of muscle loss by five months of age. Without their senescent cells, only a quarter of them showed the same signs at ten months. Their muscle fibres were larger, and they ran further on treadmills. Even old mice, whose bodies had started to decline, showed improvements. _Discover

Another look at this research from the Economist:

Dr Baker genetically engineered a group of mice that were already quite unusual. They had a condition called progeria, meaning that they aged much more rapidly than normal mice. (A few unfortunate humans suffer from a similar condition.) The extra tweak he added to the DNA of these mice was a way of killing cells that produce P16INK4A. He did this by inserting into the animals’ DNA, near the gene for P16INK4A, a second gene that was, because of this proximity, controlled by the same genetic switch. This second gene, activated whenever the gene for P16INK4A was active, produced a protein that was harmless in itself, but which could be made deadly by the presence of a particular drug. Giving a mouse this drug, then, would kill cells which had reached their Hayflick limits while leaving other cells untouched. Dr Baker raised his mice, administered the drug, and watched.

The results were spectacular. Mice given the drug every three days from birth suffered far less age-related body-wasting than those which were not. They lost less fatty tissue. Their muscles remained plump (and effective, too, according to treadmill tests). And they did not suffer cataracts of the eye. They did, though, continue to experience age-related problems in tissues that do not produce P16INK4A as they get old. In particular, their hearts and blood vessels aged normally (or, rather, what passes for normally in mice with progeria). For that reason, since heart failure is the main cause of death in such mice, their lifespans were not extended.

The drug, Dr Baker found, produced some benefit even if it was administered to a mouse only later in life. Though it could not clear cataracts that had already formed, it partly reversed muscle-wasting and fatty-tissue loss. Such mice were thus healthier than their untreated confrères. _Economist

This research will require replication and a great deal of clarification, before it moves from mice to larger mammals such as humans. But it opens up a number of possible avenues of research.

The second hint of likely means to achieve healthier long lives, is research done in fruit flies at the Salk Institute, in southern California.

Although it is a well-documented fact that restricting calories during daily food intake is the easiest strategy to extend life spans for both humans and animals, little is known about biological mechanisms underlying this phenomenon.

…”Fruit flies and humans have a lot more in common than most people think,” said Leanne Jones, an Associate Professor at Salk’s Laboratory of Genetics and a lead scientist on the project, “There is a tremendous amount of similarity between a human small intestine and the fruit fly intestine.”

The researchers found that boosting the activity of dPGC-1, the Fruit Fly version of the gene, resulted in greater numbers of mitochondria and more energy-production in flies; the same phenomenon is seen in organisms on calorie restricted diets.

When the activity of the gene was accelerated in stem and progenitor cells of the intestine, which serve to replenish intestinal tissues, these cellular changes correspond with better health and longer lifespan.

The flies lived between 20 and 50 percent longer, depending on the method and extent to which the activity of the gene was altered. _ibtimes

The fruit fly research suggests that not only healthier long lives are possible, but “longer long” lives are possible as well.

The approach taken by the SENS Foundation involves using multiple approaches to extending healthy lifespan. Destroying senescent cells — such as Darren Baker is learning to do — is one of the main approaches that SENS is following. Improving the function of mitochondria is another of the main tactics of SENS.

As humans in advanced societies are putting less and less energy into raising children, and putting more and more energy into raising themselves, thoughts of increased longevity and lifespan are coming more into the mainstream of respectability. The main limitation to further research into life extension is — as always — funding. But even with unlimited funding, moving the research from animal models into human therapeutics would take a matter of decades.

Al Fin Longevity

So, recently I’ve discovered that I can actually refinish wood furniture. For a while I went through a phase where I wanted to paint everything, and I certainly still think paint has its place, but there are certainly plenty of cases where it’s nice to be able to see the grain of the wood you’re working with. Wood grain from actual trees is incredibly intricate and each piece of furniture is bound to be unique in this regard — no two trees are exactly alike, after all.

For some reason, though, until I actually tried it, my conceptualization of refinishing furniture was that it was this weird esoteric thing that only professionals with very specialized tools could do. But this is far from being true…really, it’s just a lot of work to refinish something, and the majority of that work is in getting the old finish (or old paint, if someone has painted the piece) off. Which is sort of the un-fun part for a lot of people, I guess.

But I can now say that refinishing is, much to my pleasant surprise, not actually THAT difficult. It just takes persistence to get through the old finish and get ALL of it off so it doesn’t interfere with whatever new treatments you plan to apply to the wood.

Anyway, the very first thing I refinished (a few months ago) was a night stand I got at Goodwill. I was tired of not having anywhere to put my glasses or water at night and the bedroom just looked kind of spartan with only the platform bed and the two Ubiquitous Ikea MALM Dressers in it.

Thus began my quest to find a nightstand that would (a) fit nicely in my bedroom, (b) be interesting-looking, (c) be durable (as in, hopefully made of actual wood rather than that pressboard stuff that eventually just seems to disintegrate), and (d) not cost a lot (given the fact that I’m both currently between jobs and a cheapskate even when I AM employed).

So, I checked at various thrift stores in the area…it took something like four trips to find something that fit all my quest criteria. Below is a “before” picture of the piece — this was taken when I first got it home, before I’d done anything to modify it:

I am not a furniture historian, but based on the shiny finish, curvy brass handle, and construction style (solid wood with veneers) I would place the origins of this thing somewhere between mid-1970s and mid-1980s. It also gave off a sense of being “hotel furniture”…something about the reverberation of the drawer when I opened and closed it, as well as the fact that the drawer had obviously been repaired several times in a manner that was sturdy but ugly.

The things I saw in it that I liked were the fact that it was indeed solid wood. Veneered solid wood, but the veneer was actually decently thick and the wood underneath looked to be in good shape overall (there was some water damage but it was superficial and sanded out easily). The picture below shows the piece from the back — I ended up removing that thin piece of paneling (which was rather weakly nailed on) over the back, as I discovered it wasn’t really adding anything structural to the unit.

The veneer thickness is also visible in this photo…and it’s another aspect of the unit that made me think both “hotel furniture” and “1980s construction at the very latest”, seeing as it’s a fair bit thicker than what you’re likely to see these days in comparable pieces. I was also lucky it was as thick as it was seeing as I ended up doing a heck of a lot of sanding!

The finish was in terrible condition (you can’t see it easily from the “before” picture above, but the shiny stuff was really dinged up in places). I can’t stand that really shiny finish anyway (at least not on wood). though, so I was prepared to deal with that.

Here the unit is after full stripping and sanding (and after I removed the back panel). I used mineral spirits, two different kinds of paint scraper, and lots of coarse sandpaper (attached to a sanding block) to get it to this point. Personally I think it already looks better here than it did when I brought it home!

Here is the first iteration of staining/decoration. I used Dark Mahogany gel stain over the whole piece, then sanded it off the top and bottom shelf. I then painted some stripes on the drawer…mostly to hide the wood filler I used to plug up the holes where the old handle used to attach.

At this point it looked…tidier, but still not quite what I was after, visually speaking. It didn’t feel like something that would fit in my house yet. Plus the color still looked slightly wrong somehow.

For a while I was stumped as to where to go next…but then my imagination kicked in, and I found myself making up a story about a nondescript little night-stand which had somehow fallen through a dimensional portal from an alternate-history timeline (where it had been owned by a sort of grandfatherly astronomer sort of guy) and ended up in a mid-grade hotel, where it had sat for nearly 30 years enviously listening to the travelers who came through and stayed in its room chattering about their interesting trips throughout the world.

With that in mind, I now had a bit more of an aesthetic plan…that is, I wanted some sort of astronomy motif worked in, and I wanted to add some distressing to the wood, and I wanted the overall effect to be somewhat amusingly anachronistic. (If that makes any sense. The art module in my brain isn’t exactly very well wired to the language module, in a manner of speaking, so this stuff might be coming out oddly).

Anyway, this (above) was my first attempt at realizing the imagined biographical aspirations of the Little Nightstand That Could. While the result was…heading in the right direction, my (first ever-in-my-life) attempt at decoupaging the top of the piece failed pretty miserably. I failed to add enough glue to the back side of the paper (on which I’d printed out, via Google Image Search, an old drawing of an armillary sphere) so when I added glue to the top it got all wrinkly and I couldn’t get rid of the bubbles…and then things started tearing, so I had to rip everything off and start over.

I also tried painting a border around the top panel (where the decoupage was)…this again was kind of like what I was imagining, but the execution wasn’t quite right. And the bottom shelf just looked terrible completely covered with opaque grey paint.

Finally, my third decoupage attempt came out sufficiently neat-looking — no bubbles this time, and I managed to seal the edges pretty well.

I also reduced the size of the decoupaged area considerably from my original plan, which allowed me to sand off some of the finish on the top again (to what I think was a pretty nifty effect…sort of a streaky/blotchy but not overly haphazard look when combined with a few judiciously placed grey painted bits).

I also sanded the front of the drawer to fade out some of the reddishness of the mahogany stain and was VERY happy with how that turned out.

I don’t know what kind of wood this drawer is made of but the grain is very pretty and the way it managed to sort of “hold on” to little bits of everything I’d smeared on it led to something even cooler-looking than I’d anticipated.

Then I sanded off a bunch of the grey paint on the bottom shelf too…and that completed the look. A few coats of polyurethane later, the new-old nightstand was in my bedroom, where it now sits quite happily, holding water glasses and other typical bedside miscellany, and generally looking as if it belongs exactly where it is.

Existence is Wonderful

the naked mole rat has what could be the most extraordinary set of natural defenses ever found in a mammal. A mouse’s life is short and terrible—even in the lab, with plenty of food and a steady thermostat, it lasts for just three or four years at the most. A naked mole rat shows no sign of aging until it’s a quarter of a century old. Blind and plump, it skitters around in a hazmat suit of its own creation. _Slate

Naked mole rats appear impervious to radiation and carcinogens of all kinds. These naked mole rats are incredibly reluctant to get cancer. And that is not the half of it:

In 2004, Buffenstein and her students tried one of these shortcuts. They placed some mole rats in a gamma chamber and blasted their pale, pink bodies with ionizing rays. The animals were unimpressed. When I visited Buffenstein’s lab this past July, many were still alive, skittering through the plastic tubes of their basement habitat at the Barshop Institute for Longevity and Aging Studies.

Four years later, Buffenstein…infected cells from a naked mole rat with a virus designed to corrupt their nuclei with the cancer-causing genes SV40 TAg and Ras. Then she slipped those cells into a live mouse, under the skin behind its ear. If you do the same using infected material from a mouse or a rat, or even a cow or a human, the transplant quickly grows into a deadly tumor, invading nearby fat and muscle tissue. But when Buffenstein and her colleagues used cells from a naked mole-rat, nothing happened.

…Earlier this year, one of Buffenstein’s graduate students tried smearing the skin of half a dozen naked mole rats with a pair of vicious carcinogens: A synthetic compound called DMBA and an inflammatory agent known as TPA. When the same toxic pairing was applied to regular Black-6 lab mice as an experimental control, a cluster of tumors popped up within weeks. Every single mouse had cancer, and every single mouse died. The naked mole rats went on skittering through their tubes.

…Her latest assault involves pouring carcinogens down the mole rats’ throats in a last-ditch effort to induce liver or mammary cancer. But that may not work, either. For years, Buffenstein’s laboratory Rasputins have been irradiated, poisoned, and heated up; their cells dosed with every imaginable pollutant—chemotherapies, oxidative stressors, and heavy metals—with little or no effect. “You name it,” the professor says, “we tried all the kinds of toxins that are out there, and the naked mole rat seems to be very resilient and resistant.”

…The very thing that makes naked mole rats so interesting to Buffenstein—an astonishing vitality that lasts for decades—only makes her research more difficult. “You’re caught between a rock and a hard place, because they live so long that your grandchildren have to finish the studies you start.” Still, slow science may have rich rewards, and the decisions we make today—on whether to invest in new model organisms or build out the ones we already have—are sure to have profound effects on the (human) generations to come. _Slate

The above Slate article by Daniel Engber is an excellent example of good science writing. We learn about the things that make the naked mole rat intriguing as an object of study, then we learn why the biomedical funding establishment is so biased against funding studies using naked mole rats. The life of science is full of such conflicts, which can drive scientists out of the lab entirely if they cannot learn to deal with the frustrating politics and grant grubbing.

No human would want to trade places with a naked mole rat, even if it meant living 10 times longer — and in better health — than the average human. But we might want some of the naked rats resistance to cancer and degenerative change.

Human gerontologists are not trying to discover the path to immortality. They are not even trying to give humans the relative advantage in life span that the naked mole rat has over other rodents. What human scientists are trying to achieve is fairly modest — they want to find a way to delay the signs of aging for roughly seven years beyond the average:

THE TARGET What we have in mind is not the unrealistic pursuit of dramatic increases in life expectancy, let alone the kind of biological immortality best left to science fiction novels.20 Rather, we envision a goal that is realistically achievable: a modest deceleration in the rate of aging sufficient to delay all aging-related diseases and disorders by about seven years.21 This target was chosen because the risk of death and most other negative attributes of aging tends to rise exponentially throughout the adult lifespan with a doubling time of approximately seven years.22 Such a delay would yield health and longevity benefits greater than what would be achieved with the elimination of cancer or heart disease.23 And we believe it can be achieved for generations now alive.

If we succeed in slowing aging by seven years, the age-specific risk of death, frailty, and disability will be reduced by approximately half at every age. People who reach the age of 50 in the future would have the health profile and disease risk of today’s 43-year-old; those aged 60 would resemble current 53-year-olds, and so on. Equally important, once achieved, this seven-year delay would yield equal health and longevity benefits for all subsequent generations, much the same way children born in most nations today benefit from the discovery and development of immunizations.

A growing chorus of scientists agrees that this objective is scientifically and technologically feasible. How quickly we see success depends in part on the priority and support devoted to the effort. Certainly such a great goal – to win back, on average, seven years of healthy life – requires and deserves significant resources in time, talent and treasury. But with the mammoth investment already committed in caring for the sick as they age, and the pursuit of ever-more expensive treatments and surgical procedures for existing fatal and disabling diseases, the pursuit of the Longevity Dividend would be modest by comparison. In fact, because a healthier, longer-lived population will add significant wealth to the economy, an investment in the Longevity Dividend would likely pay for itself. _”TheScientist“_via_NR

Can we learn anything toward that end, from the naked mole rat? Quite possibly. But we have to be willing to put in the time and expense to learn how to transfer the lessons from that exceptional rodent to the human species.

Al Fin Longevity

Obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) is a common neuropsychiatric condition that is frequently unrecognized and untreated, resulting in significant personal suffering and functional impairment. This article reviews the current state of knowledge of OCD epidemiology, clinical features and natural history, differential Obsessive-compulsive disorder diagnosis, and Obsessive Compulsive Disorders treatment options, focusing on how Obsessive Compulsive affects elderly. (more…)

In older patients without apparent cardiovascular disease, the number of cardiac myocytes declines, while residual myocytes enlarge. Concurrently, there is an increase in elastic and collagenous tissue in all parts of the interstitial matrix and conduction system with advancing age. (more…)

Only about 5–12% of people attending specialty Obsessive Compulsive Disorders OCD clinics are 60 years or older. However, OCD is rarely diagnosed in general outpatient settings in the elderly, as noted in a study of the Kaiser Health Maintenance Organization in which only 29 cases per 100 000 patients were reported. OCD seldom begins in late life, and most elderly people with this disorder who present for treatment have had symptoms for decades. A study of consecutively evaluated outpatients found only 1% of those in an OCD clinic had the onset of the disorder after age 50. (more…)

There are a number of issues that must be considered in geriatric pain assessment. The major issues that merit attention are presence of comorbidities, mental status, depression in late life, limitations in ADLs, medications, and the importance of family and other support systems (see Depression; Social Networks, Support, and Integration). (more…)

Some researches on relation between exercise and body human health results indicate that in addition to increasing muscle capacity, physical activity can help improve strength, balance, joint mobility, flexibility, agility, the speed with which one walks and physical coordination as a whole. In addition, physical activity has effects favorably on metabolism, blood pressure regulation, and prevention of an excessive increase in weight. (more…)

The economic status of older adults in the United States today is greatly improved, and there is much diversity of circumstances among different elder populations. In 2004 inflation-adjusted dollars, the median income of elderly households had increased from $13,228 in 1960 to $24,509 in 2004. Since the mid-1950s, poverty, as measured in 2005 by the U.S. Census Bureau’s poverty thresholds, has decreased for all age groups but most noticeably for adults age 65 years and older. (more…)