So, should age of retirement be adjusted?
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Posted: 06 January 2012
PARIS: Cognitive skills can start to fall from the age of 45, not from around the age of 60 as is commonly thought, according to research published on Friday by the British Medical Journal (BMJ).
Researchers led by Archana Singh-Manoux from the Centre for Research in Epidemiology and Population Health in France and University College London observed 5,198 men and 2,192 women over a 10-year period from 1997.
The volunteers were London civil servants aged between 45 and 70 who had been enrolled in a long-term health study.
Over the 10 years, the participants were tested three times - for memory, vocabulary, and skills in aural and visual comprehension.
During this time, there was a 3.6-percent decline in mental reasoning in men aged 45-49 and a 9.6-percent fall in those aged 65-70. The corresponding figures for women were 3.6 and 7.4 percent.
"Cognitive decline is already evident in middle age," says the paper, which defines this as the years from 45 to 49.
The findings should spur further research into spotting and braking cognitive deterioration, the authors hope.
Many societies face an "exponential increase" in the number of elderly people as a result of increases in life expectancy, they note.
"These changes are likely to have a profound influence on individuals' lives and society at large. Poor cognitive status is perhaps the single most disabling condition in old age."
- AFP/de
Taken from ChannelNewsAsia.com; source article is below:
Brain power can decline from age 45
Posted: 04 January 2012
WASHINGTON: Obese people who undergo gastric bypass surgery are less likely to die from heart attack and stroke than people who receive more conventional treatment for their weight condition, a Swedish study said on Tuesday.
The study, published in the January 4 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association, included about 4,000 patients in Sweden who were recruited between 1987 and 2001.
The surgery patients either had gastric bypass (13.2 percent), banding (18.7 percent), or vertical banded gastroplasty (68.1 percent), and all lost 16-23 percent of their body weight in subsequent years.
The control group did not have any type of surgery and showed a 0-1 percent weight loss at follow-up periods of two, 10, 15 and 20 years.
"Bariatric surgery was associated with reduced number of fatal heart attack deaths (22 in the surgery group versus 37 in the control group)," said the study led by Lars Sjostrom of the University of Gothenburg, Sweden.
Bariatric surgery was also linked to a lower number of heart attacks overall, fewer strokes, and fewer fatal strokes.
But when the researchers looked at weight change alone, they could find no significant relationship to cardiovascular events in either group, suggesting that the weight loss itself might not be the driver of fewer deaths.
"There are many benefits to bariatric surgery and that some of these benefits are independent of the degree of the surgically induced weight loss," said the study.
Other studies have shown that the benefits of gastric surgery for extremely obese people can include long-term changes of body weight, better quality of life, and fewer incidences of diabetes and cancer.
"The message is clear - bariatric surgery saves lives," said Mitchell Roslin, chief of obesity surgery at Lenox Hill Hospital in New York, who was not involved in the study.
Roslin noted that the most common type of surgery in the study, vertical banded gastroplasty, has been replaced by newer methods that are even more effective, so the cardiovascular death risk is likely even lower today.
As many as 200,000 gastric bypass operations, in which the stomach is sectioned off so that the smaller amounts of food can fit inside, are done annually in the United States, where about a third of people are obese.
- AFP/de
Taken from ChannelNewsAsia.com; source article is below:
Gastric bypass cuts death risk
