New initiatives raise hope that our life expectancy will soon reach 120 years. But a survey finds many of us don't want all those extra birthdays.
Some of the nation's brightest minds have declared an all-out war against aging. From Google's campus to university labs to government think tanks, researchers claim that babies born this year should live up to 120 years and that, long before today's infants mature, some readily achievable changes in health care will have produced millions of sharp, active and healthy centenarians.
Nobody walks into (or drives through) a fast food restaurant expecting to order a health food. But you might, at the very least, expect that what you order is, well, what you order. Chicken is chicken and beef is beef, right? Think again: What many fast food meals feature is real-life mystery meat.
Once an adjective reserved for scholarly work, “curatorial” has come to be applied to the discrimination with which we acquire everything from doorknobs, toasters and digital devices to baskets from Bali, pillows from Portugal and who knows what else.
Despite life-saving advances in treating strokes, these "brain attacks" can shave years off of a person's life and seriously impair the quality of the years they have left, a new study shows.
The damage is most pronounced after a severe stroke, but even those people who have a so-called mini-stroke or transient ischemic attack (TIA) are at risk. The new findings appear online in the Oct. 9 issue of the journal Neurology.
The clot thickens. We now have a clearer idea of why black Americans are twice as likely as white Americans to develop heart disease.
It seems that fragments circulating in the blood, known as platelets, can form blood clots more easily in African Americans. Clotting is a classic element of heart disease and heart attack.
"Unexpectedly, we found that platelets from black donors clotted faster and to a greater extent in response to the naturally occurring clotting agent, thrombin," says Paul Bray of Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, who led the work. "This provides a new understanding of the effects of race on heart disease and other blood-clot related illnesses."
At this stage of your life, your most valuable asset isn't youthful vigor or a full head of hair. It's time. Because you're decades from retirement, contributions to a 401(k) or other retirement plan will have years to compound and grow. Even a modest contribution now will pack a much greater wallop than a significantly larger contribution when you're in your forties and fifties.
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