My mother walked her various dogs every day for a mile or more until the last cocker spaniel, Nancy, bit a neighbor. This was not the first of her dogs to bite, but it was the last. Mom sadly relinquished Nancy to the daughter of another neighbor. And then she stopped walking at about 75. Soon she could walk no more than a block or two, without resting on a bench or wall to relieve the pain in her back. She lived for 20 more years but never walked more than a few steps again.
She is my cautionary tale when it comes to movement. I walk at least twice a week for 2 miles or more. I also take two mild yoga classes and, before we were sheltered in place in 2020, at least one water aerobics class. I enjoy the camaraderie of my walks, always with another, and the sociability of a class in the water with 15 or so other women around my age. I enjoy the challenge of my yoga classes although, it is in them that I am most aware of my aging. I’m not as flexible. I can’t hold poses as long as I once did. There are some poses I just plain can’t do any more. This makes me sad and sometimes angry that my body won’t do what I want it to do. But I will not stop moving.
Recently, in the course of writing about aging, I came across the Baltimore Longitudinal Study of Aging (BLSA), the longest existing continuous study of the aging process. It was started in 1958 with healthy volunteers who were 20 years old and older and has followed them for life. The study is under the aegis of the National Institute on Aging, and is available for scientists outside of the study for use in other studies on aging. New volunteers join the study as participants on an ongoing basis.
Some of the functions BLSA assesses are mobility, cognition, brain and nerve structure and function, muscle strength and sensory functions. Follow-up visits occur every four years for participants 60 and younger, two years for participants 60–79, and every year for those over 80. The study even does autopsies on those who consent.
BLSA has concluded that, while there is tremendous variability in the aging process, three attributes seem to predict a healthier and happier aging. The first is a positive attitude developed during middle age about aging, which seems to carry the optimistic agers through later adulthood with the ability to maintain a happier lifestyle. This doesn’t mean that they have lower than average rates of disease and deterioration, but it does mean that optimistic agers seem to be more resilient and bounce back from episodes of illness or other physical and mental challenges.
The second attribute is movement — not necessarily heroic and unusual movement like senior marathons — but some kind of frequent and regular exercise.
The third is weight maintenance. This means that over the trajectory of adulthood, those studied didn’t gain much weight. When asked at a conference on aging if there were a particular diet that seemed to enable this weight maintenance, Dr. Luigi Ferrucci, now retired Scientific Director of the BLSA, said that the Mediterranean Diet seemed the healthiest, but the study had not found conclusive evidence as to why this might be so. The Mediterranean Diet is often recommended by doctors to their overweight patients as it has been widely proven to be effective and medically sound.
One more finding that seems particularly pertinent to this chaotic period in the waxing and waning of the coronavirus, is that illness and the lowering of physical and cognitive functions take more energy from the normal store that we have to deal with everyday life. This means that something like hearing loss has a negative impact on normal functioning. I guess I should have known this, or I should have known that the normal changes in the aging process take from the normal store of our energy quotient and make us more vulnerable (due to a loss of energy) to things like the virus. I’d already scheduled a hearing test for this coming week, and I now feel much more positively about its possible results.
