Good Attitudes About Aging Help Seniors Handle Stress

New research from North Carolina State University finds that having a positive attitude about aging makes older adults more resilient when faced with stressful situations.

“There has been a lot of research on how older adults respond to stress, but the findings have been mixed: some studies have found that older adults are less resilient than younger adults at responding to stress; some have found that they’re more resilient; and some have found no difference,” says Jennifer Bellingtier, a Ph.D. student at NC State and lead author of a paper describing the work. “We wanted to see whether attitudes toward aging could account for this disparity in research findings. In other words, are older adults with positive attitudes about aging more resilient than older adults with negative attitudes?”

The answer is yes.

For the study, researchers had 43 adults between the ages of 60 and 96 fill out a daily questionnaire for eight consecutive days. At the beginning of the study, participants were asked about their attitudes toward aging. For example, participants were asked if they felt they were as useful now as they had been when they were younger, and whether they were as happy as when they were younger.

The daily questionnaire asked participants about any stress they’d experienced that day, as well as the extent to which they experienced negative emotions, such as fear, irritability or distress.

The researchers also accounted for the personality of study participants. Were they optimistic and upbeat about everything, or are there benefits tied specifically to an individual’s attitudes about aging?

“We found that people in the study who had more positive attitudes toward aging were more resilient in response to stress – meaning that there wasn’t a significant increase in negative emotions,” Bellingtier says. “Meanwhile, study participants with more negative attitudes toward aging showed a sharp increase in negative emotional affect on stressful days.”

“This tells us that the way we think about aging has very real consequences for how we respond to difficult situations when we’re older,” says Shevaun Neupert, an associate professor of psychology at NC State and senior author on the paper. “That affects our quality of life and may also have health ramifications. For example, more adverse emotional responses to stress have been associated with increased cardiovascular health risks.”

“Our findings are likely applicable to other Americans, but it’s not clear to what extent the findings would be relevant elsewhere,” Bellingtier says. “Attitudes toward aging vary widely across cultures, and more work would need to be done to determine the importance of aging attitudes in other settings.”

The paper, “Negative aging attitudes predict greater reactivity to daily stressors in older adults,” will be published online at 8 a.m. on Aug. 3 in the Journal of Gerontology: Psychological Sciences. The work was done with funding from NC State.

Full story can be found from NCSU website.

Gene helps prevent heart attack, stroke and effects of aging

A gene that scientific dogma insists is inactive in adults actually plays a vital role in preventing the underlying cause of most heart attacks and strokes, researchers at the School of Medicine have determined. The discovery opens a new avenue for battling those deadly conditions, and it raises the tantalizing prospect that doctors could use the gene to prevent or delay at least some of the effects of aging.

“Finding a way to augment the expression of this gene in adult cells may have profound implications for promoting health and possibly reversing some of the detrimental effects with aging,” said researcher Gary K. Owens, PhD, director of UVA’s Robert M. Berne Cardiovascular Research Center.

The gene, Oct4, plays a key role in the development of all living organisms, but scientists have, until now, thought it was permanently inactivated after embryonic development. Some controversial studies have suggested it might have another function later in life, but the UVA researchers are the first to provide conclusive evidence of that: Owens and his colleagues have determined the gene plays a critical protective role during the formation of atherosclerotic plaques inside blood vessels. The rupturing of these plaques is the underlying cause of many heart attacks and strokes.

The researchers found that Oct4 controls the movement of smooth muscle cells into protective fibrous “caps” inside the plaques – caps that make the plaques less likely to rupture. The researchers also have provided evidence that the gene promotes many changes in gene expression that are beneficial in stabilizing the plaques. This is exciting, because studies suggest that it may be possible to develop drugs or other therapeutic agents that target the Oct4 pathway as a means to reduce the incidence of heart attacks or stroke. “Our findings have major implications regarding possible novel therapeutic approaches for promoting stabilization of atherosclerotic plaques,” said Olga A. Cherepanova, PhD, a senior research scientist in Owens’ lab.

One surprising finding from UVA’s research: When the researchers blocked the effect of Oct4 in mice, they thought the atherosclerotic plaques might become smaller, because of the reduced number of smooth muscle cells inside. Instead, the plaques grew larger, less stable and more dangerous, stuffed with lipids, dead cells and other damaging components.

While UVA’s research has focused on how Oct4 offers cardiovascular protection, Owens and his colleagues believe the gene could also prove critical to the field of regenerative medicine, which investigates the growth and replacement of tissues and organs. The researchers believe that Oct4 and its family of target genes are activated in other somatic cells – the non-reproductive cells in the body – and play a key role in the cells’ ability to repair damage and heal wounds. Studies to test this are under way in Owens’ lab.

Oct4 is one of the “stem cell pluripotency factors” described by Shinya Yamanaka, MD, PhD, for which he received the 2012 Nobel Prize. His lab and many others have shown that artificial over-expression of Oct4 within somatic cells grown in a lab dish is essential for reprogramming these cells into induced pluripotential stem cells, which can then develop into any cell type in the body or even an entire organism.

The UVA researchers suspect that at least some of the detrimental effects of aging, including the increased possibility of a plaque rupture, stem from a decrease in the body’s ability to reactivate Oct4. “Finding a way to reactivate this pathway may have profound implications for health and aging,” Owens said. “We think this is just the tip of the iceberg for controlling plasticity of somatic cells, and this could impact many human diseases and the field of regenerative medicine. Who knows, this may end up being the ‘fountain-of-youth gene,’ a way to revitalize old and worn-out cells. Only time will tell.”

More details can be found from UVA Health System website by clicking here.