"How do you feel about old people?" A report from Time states that a new study tells us to think positively about aging as this plays an important role on how to handle Alzheimer's disease. This is based on a series of two new studies from the journal, Psychology and Aging.
This likely has a relation about how an individual thinks or feel about the aged.
The researchers from the Yale School of Public Health said this is a first time occurrence that this kind of risk factor has been identified with direct connection to the progressive brain changes associated with Alzheimer's.
For the first study, the researchers examined the results from 158 health people without dementia. These participants joined the Baltimore Longitudinal Study of Aging (BLSA). In order to look into how people perceive age stereotypes, the team used a scale with carefully chosen statements like "older people are absent-minded" or "older people have trouble learning new things."
The participants in the study gave the answers while they were in their 40s.
After 25 years, the people in the same group were 68 years old; they started annual MRI brain scans for a decade. This is to check the volume of their hippocampus. If there is a loss of volume present in this area of the brain, it is highly linked with the disease.
Those who had negative thoughts about aging during the early stages of their life depicted a higher loss in the hippocampus volume. Based on this, the researchers said that the people who held on to negative age stereotypes had the same level of decline within three years alone compared to the positive group's nine years.
In the second study, the researchers scrutinized two additional markers of the disease. They took a closer look at the amyloid plaques (clusters of proteins that accumulate between brain cells) and neurofibrillary tangles (twisted strands of protein that build up in brain cells). They used the brain autopsies of people whose attitudes in aging were previously measured.
The results came up with consistency. Individuals who held more positive feelings had less plaques and tangles that those who had more negative age stereotypes.
It may time for us millennials to start thinking about the good side of aging. It's better to be positive as early as now.
