An ailment boom
Baby boomers may not be doing as well in their later years as they expected when they kicked off the fitness boom and made health food stores mainstream.
A recent survey found that 59% of men and women ages 35 to 54 were “incompletely healthy.” In fact, of the more than 3,000 Americans ages 24 to 74 who were surveyed, 62.2% were “incompletely healthy” -- and almost all of them were boomers.
The Emory University survey, published in the November/December issue of the American Journal of Health Promotion, focused on physical and mental health, including whether participants suffered from one of 37 chronic conditions. People were categorized according to World Health Organization definitions of health that also took into account other physical and mental characteristics, such as physical limitations and social and emotional well-being, says lead author Corey Keyes, assistant professor of sociology at Emory University in Atlanta.
But, in a surprising finding, the unhealthiest group in the random sampling was the youngest: 22% of the “completely unhealthy” were under age 44.
“The boomers get all the attention because they’re the largest group of aging Americans, but we should be concerned about the younger adults because they’re going to spend a better part of their adult life with [health] problems,” says Keyes.
For lowering cholesterol, diet could be as effective as drugs
Various foods are thought to help lower cholesterol, but combining all of them at once may work even better.
University of Toronto researchers designed a diet that combined the most-promising cholesterol-lowering foods -- soy products, vegetable proteins, almonds and plant sterols (which block absorption of cholesterol) -- and asked a group of 13 men and women to eat nothing but this diet for a month. Within two weeks of eating the prescribed diet, participants had reduced their low-density lipoprotein, or bad, cholesterol by nearly 30% on average and maintained that healthy level for four weeks.
“That’s about the same reduction we see in people who take cholesterol-lowering drugs,” says Dr. David J.A. Jenkins, professor of medicine and nutritional sciences at the University of Toronto and St. Michael’s Hospital.
The study, funded by the Canada Research Chairs Program and the Almond Board of California, appeared in the December issue of the journal Metabolism.
Treating sexual dysfunction after prostate cancer
A man’s sex life after prostate cancer treatment suffers more than had been thought, concluded a survey published last month, and now a second report says that the track record for treating the common complaint of erectile dysfunction in this group isn’t very good either.
Of more than 1,000 men whose cancer was treated with radiation or surgery at the Cleveland Clinic, only 13% were having spontaneously firm erections an average of 4.3 years later. An additional 8% were able to have good erections by using a medical treatment.
Nearly 60% of the men had used at least one treatment, according to Leslie R. Schover, associate professor of behavioral science at the University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center, and her colleagues in the Dec. 1 issue of the journal Cancer.
The most popular therapy was sildenafil (Viagra). The most invasive approaches -- penile injection therapy and penile prosthesis surgery -- were most successful, improving sex for more than 25% of the men who tried them. The dropout rate for all treatments, however, except the penile prosthesis, was greater than 50%.
Men who had the best outcomes in general were those who had no sexual problems, such as lack of desire, and who had partners who were interested in sex, says Schover.
