Old age intimacy

by Nilma Dole

It was taboo to talk about sexual needs of older people, because young people couldn’t bear to think of their grandparents as sexually agile. This is a big myth because the next time you see your grandfather holding your grandmother’s hand, be happy that they have a stable and happy marriage instead of thinking it as being repulsive, Dr. Sudhakar Krishnamurti said.

Dr. Sudhakar Krishnamurti

Worldwide andrology and sex expert, Dr. Sudhakar Krishnamurti who became the only Asian to be awarded the prestigious Herbert Newman award in original clinical research in the field of sexual medicine believes that our aversion to the idea that older people might enjoy and need sex is linked to our preconceived notions that it is negative.

According to the Indian doctor who paid a visit to Sri Lanka recently, it’s not plastic surgery or anti-ageing creams that would maintain your youth after you’re 60 but sex. He said, recent research reveals that sex is the secret ingredient for successful ageing.

A study on sexual relationships and sexual health among older people suggests that not only does sex get better with age but older people who have sex regularly save better physical and mental health than their chaste counterparts.

In the Archives of Sexual Behaviour, it revealed that among healthy 80 to 102 year-olds, 63 percent of men and 30 percent of women were still sexually active.

Some of the reasons why women could be less active is because with menopause comes complications such as dryness of the vagina or physical discomfort during sex. It could also mean that the woman could be ill in other ways, or simply rather lacking in energy. Exercise, diet and good health are linked to sexual health.

The good news is that even though women are not wildly interested in sex, they need some degree of intimacy. There is pleasure to be had from being close and hugging a lot and so on and sex often leads on from that, said the doctor in optimism.

You might think that after a certain point in a marriage, after old age catches on, that sexual intimacy between partners would wane. Young people look at old people walking feebly with walking sticks and wonder if they could even get sexually enticed let alone, walk another step. Surely, once a person ages, don’t we assume that their sexual libido has been lost too?

He said that the study of sex in older people is called geriatric sexuality and it is real and must be respected and addressed. When a woman is old and has menopause, they don’t need to worry about pregnancies and contraception anymore, he said.

Moreover, the Joan Collins syndrome (when women stay sexually active late in life) is indeed true because research shows that it is the woman, more than the man who believes that staying sexually active is important to age gracefully.

He said, In 1997, a study showed that there is a relationship between orgasm and mortality. It found that mortality was 50 percent lower in the group with higher orgasmic occurrence than in the group with lower orgasmic frequency. In addition to this, he said that when it comes to age, it is evident that sex and health go hand-in-hand.

There are various issues that accompany aging as the bodies of old people keep constantly changing. It’s not only physical but mentally and emotionally their feelings change. Older people can’t do things they used to be able to and they also deal with personality changes, appetite, mental state as well as sex drive.

Where change becomes rampant, aging is a process that can be controlled effectively provided you stay in a healthy state of mind, and it means being sexually healthy too.

The effects of colour may lie deep in evolution

Almost universally, red means stop. Red means danger. Red means hot.

And analysing the results in the 2004 Olympics, researchers have found that red also means dominance. Athletes wearing red prevailed more often than those wearing blue, especially in hand-to-hand sports like wrestling.

Why? Is it random? Is it cultural? Or does it have evolutionary roots? A new study of male rhesus macaques strongly suggests it's evolution.

"The similarity of our results with those in humans suggests that avoiding red or acting submissively in its presence may stem from an inherited psychological predisposition," says Dartmouth College neuroscientist Jerald D. Kralik, who collaborated on the study with his research assistants.

Their findings will be published in an upcoming issue of Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.

The study involved male rhesus macaques - a species of Old World monkeys that is sensitive to red, green, and blue - ranging freely in Cayo Santiago, Puerto Rico.

Two human experimenters, one male and one female, entered the monkeys' colony and found isolated males to test.

Both people knelt down, placed a Styrofoam tray in front of them, drew an apple slice from their backpacks, held the slice at chest level for the monkey to see, then placed the apple on the trays. Both stood up simultaneously and took two steps back.

The monkey typically went directly to the slice he wanted, ran off, and ate it.

The humans wore T-shirts and caps, whose colours - red, green, and blue - were changed in each of four conditions: red on female, green on male; then vice-versa; red versus blue; blue versus green.

The results were striking. The monkeys paid no mind to the sex of the experimenter. Green or blue made little difference to them either. But in the significant majority of cases, they steered clear of the red-clad humans and stole the food from the other tray.

The researchers believe that this aversion to red reflects an evolutionary adaptation. It is no accident, then, that humans know that red means no.

"We - primates and then humans - are very visual," Kralik explains. "We are also very social." In both realms, colour has important effects, from telling us which food is edible to helping us gauge the emotions of others by the relative redness of their skin. Put the two together, he says, "and we start to see that colour may have a deeper and wider-ranging influence on us than we have previously thought."

While we learn what those influences are, the researchers warn the organizers of competitive activities, such as sporting events and even academic exams, to avoid using colour "in ways that may unfairly influence people," says Kralik. What they don't say: If you want to scare the pants off your rival, wear bright red.

Source: Divya Menon, Association for Psychological Science

Link between childhood trauma and higher rates of mental health problems

New research has shown that children’s risk for learning and behaviour problems and obesity rises in correlation to their level of trauma exposure, says the psychiatrist at the Stanford University School of Medicine and Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital who oversaw the study.

A child suffering from trauma

The findings could encourage physicians to consider diagnosing post-traumatic stress disorder rather than attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder, which has similar symptoms to PTSD but very different treatment.

The study examined children living in a violent, low-income neighbourhood and documented an unexpectedly strong link between abuse, trauma and neglect and the children’s mental and physical health: It reported, for instance, that children experiencing four types of trauma were 30 times more likely to have behaviour and learning problems than those not exposed to trauma.

“In communities where there is violence, where children are exposed to events such as shootings in their neighbourhood, kids experience a constant environmental threat,” said senior author Victor Carrion, MD, associate professor of psychiatry and behavioural sciences at Stanford.

“Contrary to some people’s belief, these children don’t get used to trauma. These events remain stressful and impact children’s physiology.”The new study is published online in Child Abuse & Neglect; The International Journal. Carrion collaborated on the research with scientists at the University of New Orleans and the Bay-view Child Health Centre, part of San Francisco’s California Pacific Medical Centre.

Findings

The findings provide compelling evidence that paediatricians should routinely screen children for trauma exposures, said Carrion, who is also a child psychiatrist at Packard Children’s.

“As simple as it may seem, physicians do not ask about trauma,” he said. “And kids get the wrong diagnoses.”

The study builds on earlier work that linked worsening health in adults with their dose of exposure to nine types of adverse childhood events, including being subject to various kinds of abuse or neglect; having a household member who abused alcohol or drugs, was incarcerated or was mentally ill; having a mother who was treated violently; and not living in a two-parent household. Middle-class men exposed to more of these events had more chronic diseases in adulthood, the prior research found. The results of the current study highlight the need for early identification of such adversity-associated health problems, and early intervention. Obesity, for example, may act as a mediator to other health problems such as diabetes, cardiac risk and inflammatory illness.

To perform the study, the researchers evaluated medical records from 701 children treated at a primary-care clinic in Bay-view-Hunter’s Point, a San Francisco neighbourhood with high rates of poverty and violence.

About half the children were African-American; the rest came from other ethnic backgrounds. Each child’s exposure to adverse events was scored on a scale from 0 to 9, with one point given for each type of adversity. The researchers also evaluated the medical records for evidence of obesity and learning or behaviour problems.

Two-thirds of the children in the study had experienced at least one category of adversity, and 12 percent experienced four or more categories.

Score

An adversity score of 4 or higher left kids 30 times as likely to show learning and behaviour problems and twice as likely to be obese as those with a score of 0. Children with an adversity score of 1 were 10 times as likely to have learning and behavior problems as those not exposed to trauma.

Prior research has shown that about 30 percent of children in violent communities have symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder, which can include the learning and behaviour problems detected in the current study, Carrion noted. However, a physician unaware of the fact that a child experienced trauma, and noting the child’s physiological hyperarousability and cognitive difficulties, may diagnose ADHD instead of PTSD.

That’s a problem because the two disorders have opposite treatments, he said. Kids with PTSD need psychotherapy, not the stimulant medications given for ADHD.

“Children can recover from PTSD with the appropriate treatment, which is one of approach and not avoidance,” Carrion said. “By not asking about trauma, we’re utilising avoidance.

We’re perpetuating PTSD.” As part of their efforts to address the long-term health problems that stem from childhood trauma, Carrion, his collaborators and several San

Francisco community partners are working to launch the Centre for Youth Wellness, a one-stop health and wellness centre for urban children and families in San Francisco. The Centre for Youth Wellness will combine paediatrics with mental health services, educational support, family support, research and best practices in child-abuse response under one roof.

Coordinate

With both public and private support, the centre will coordinate the services of multiple agencies to give children a safe and accessible place to increase their resilience to adverse life experiences and improve their well-being.

“We need to create trauma-informed systems,” Carrion concluded, adding that the Center for Youth Wellness hopes to function as a model for such systems across the nation.

People working for the welfare of children need to be on the lookout for trauma and know how to intervene, and how to work with the family and with schools, he said.

“If trauma goes untreated, it’s very costly for the individuals involved and for society in general.”

Source: Erin Digitale, Stanford University Medical Centre

Start eating more fruit

Before people develop type 2 diabetes, they almost always have “prediabetes,” defined as blood glucose levels that are higher than normal but not yet high enough to be diagnosed as diabetes. Recent research has shown that even during prediabetes both heart and circulatory long-term damage to the body may already be occurring.

Both pre-diabetics and diabetics are sometimes concerned about eating fruit due to its reported “high sugar content.” Are fruits wrongly lumped into the catch-all phrase “carbohydrate” and incorrectly classified as a sugar food?

Regardless of which stage of diabetes one might be experiencing or not, all of us would fare far better by including more fruit consumption in our daily diets while reducing grains, breads, meal replacement bars and the plethora of refined manufactured carbohydrates that are consumed instead, according to Dian Griesel, and Tom Griesel, co-authors of the new book, TurboCharged: Accelerate Your Fat Burning Metabolism.

There is considerable research supporting their claims. Researchers from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta completed a 20-year study that involved closely watching the diets of a group of individuals between the ages of 25 and 74. The study named the first National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey concluded that fruits and vegetables had a demonstratively positive, protective effect against diabetes.

As reported in Preventive Medicine, “A healthy diet including fruits and vegetables could help prevent diabetes from ever occurring. The higher levels of fruit and vegetable consumption might decrease the risk of diabetes in adults, particularly women.”

The average daily intake of fruits and vegetables as well as the number of participants consuming five or more fruits and vegetables per day was lower among the participants who developed diabetes than among the participants in the study who remained free of this disease.

The investigators determined that these results suggest that fruit and vegetable consumption may decrease the risk for diabetes.”

“Lumping fruit into the broad category of carbohydrates is confusing to us as consumers-diabetic or not. Fruits are loaded with vitamins, minerals, fiber and perfectly filled with water that allows better absorption of their natural nutritive properties,” says Tom Griesel.

The confusion with fruit eating by diabetics at any stage may have arisen because according to the Glycemic Index, some fruits, like bananas, considered by many “Nature’s Perfect Food,” are rated with a high glycemic index.

“Glycemic index is significantly altered by the type of food, its ripeness, processing, the length of storage, cooking methods, and its variety.

Watermelon has a glycemic score of 100-which is identical to heavily processed and nutrient poor white bread,” says Dian Griesel.

Source: Business School of Happiness

Simple test could hold key to early diagnosis of cancers

Cancers of the gut, stomach and pancreas could be detected much sooner with a simple urine test, research suggests. Researchers have identified key proteins in the urine of patients with advanced cancers.

The findings could help the detection of these cancers in people who have not yet started to show symptoms of the disease.

This would enable patients to be diagnosed much earlier, leading to improved survival rates.

Only around 10 per cent of patients with these cancers - known as cancers of the upper gastrointestinal tract - are still alive five years after diagnosis.

This is because such cancers, which tend to be aggressive, are often diagnosed at an advanced stage.

Dr Holger Husi, of the University of Edinburgh’s Tissue Injury and Repair Group, said: “The aim of this work is to enable these cancers to be diagnosed much earlier.

This would help us treat the cancer before it has a chance to spread. The majority of these cancers are currently diagnosed late where no surgery is possible due to its advanced stage. Earlier diagnosis would mean that curative surgery or chemotherapy would be possible for more patients.”

The research, published in the journal Proteomics-Clinical Applications, compared urine samples from patients with upper gastrointestinal cancers with urine samples from people who were cancer-free.

Scientists analysed the samples to identify thousands of proteins. They then identified six particular proteins, which were present in 98 per cent of the cancer cases but absent in almost 90 per cent of samples from patients without cancer.

The researchers then narrowed molecules down to the two proteins - S100A6 and S1009 - most likely to appear in samples from patients with cancer but be absent from the other samples.

The scientists now intend to see whether people with early stage cancers, which have not yet been diagnosed, have the same levels of proteins present.

This would involve analysing samples from at least 1,000 volunteers and tracking the participants over a number of years to identify those who are then later diagnosed with upper gastrointestinal cancers.

Source: University of Edinburgh