Author: Royda Crose
Publisher: Jossey-Bass
ISBN:
Category : Health & Fitness
Languages : en
Pages : 200
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Book Description
In the game of life, women are winning by about seven years. What are they doing differently? And what are the lessons men can learn? In an attempt to understand the dramatically widening gap in longevity between men and women, this book explores the specific strengths women have developed that figure into their longer life expectancy.
Author: National Research Council
Publisher: National Academies Press
ISBN: 0309217105
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 200
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Book Description
During the last 25 years, life expectancy at age 50 in the United States has been rising, but at a slower pace than in many other high-income countries, such as Japan and Australia. This difference is particularly notable given that the United States spends more on health care than any other nation. Concerned about this divergence, the National Institute on Aging asked the National Research Council to examine evidence on its possible causes. According to Explaining Divergent Levels of Longevity in High-Income Countries, the nation's history of heavy smoking is a major reason why lifespans in the United States fall short of those in many other high-income nations. Evidence suggests that current obesity levels play a substantial part as well. The book reports that lack of universal access to health care in the U.S. also has increased mortality and reduced life expectancy, though this is a less significant factor for those over age 65 because of Medicare access. For the main causes of death at older ages-cancer and cardiovascular disease-available indicators do not suggest that the U.S. health care system is failing to prevent deaths that would be averted elsewhere. In fact, cancer detection and survival appear to be better in the U.S. than in most other high-income nations, and survival rates following a heart attack also are favorable. Explaining Divergent Levels of Longevity in High-Income Countries identifies many gaps in research. For instance, while lung cancer deaths are a reliable marker of the damage from smoking, no clear-cut marker exists for obesity, physical inactivity, social integration, or other risks considered in this book. Moreover, evaluation of these risk factors is based on observational studies, which-unlike randomized controlled trials-are subject to many biases.
Author: Dr. Sharon Moalem, MD, PhD
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 1250174791
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 215
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Book Description
A Guardian Book of the Week Longlisted for the PEN / E. O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award An award-winning physician and scientist makes the game-changing case that genetic females are stronger than males at every stage of life Here are some facts: Women live longer than men. They have stronger immune systems. They're better at fighting cancer and surviving famine, and even see the world in a wider variety of colors. They are simply stronger than men at every stage of life. Why is this? And why are we taught the opposite? To find out, Dr. Sharon Moalem drew on his own medical experiences - treating premature babies in the neonatal intensive care unit; recruiting the elderly for neurogenetic studies; tending to HIV-positive orphans in Thailand - and tried to understand why in every instance men were consistently less likely to thrive. The answer, he discovered, lies in our genetics: two X chromosomes offer a powerful survival advantage. With clear, captivating prose that weaves together eye-opening research, case studies, diverse examples ranging from the behavior of honeybees to American pioneers, as well as experiences from his personal life and his own patients, Moalem explains why genetic females triumph over males when it comes to resiliency, intellect, stamina, immunity and much more. He also calls for a reconsideration of our male-centric, one-size-fits-all view of medical studies and even how we prescribe medications - a view that still sees women through the lens of men. Revolutionary and yet utterly convincing, The Better Half will make you see humanity and the survival of our species anew.
Author: Dr Sarah McKay
Publisher: Hachette Australia
ISBN: 0733638538
Category : Health & Fitness
Languages : en
Pages : 220
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Book Description
For women, understanding how the brain works during the key stages of life - in utero, childhood, puberty and adolescence, pregnancy and motherhood, menopause and old age - is essential to their health. Dr Sarah McKay is a neuroscientist who knows everything worth knowing about women's brains, and shares it in this fascinating, essential book. This is not a book about the differences between male and female brains, nor a book using neuroscience to explain gender-specific behaviours, the 'battle of the sexes' or 'Mars-Venus' stereotypes. This is a book about what happens inside the brains and bodies of women as they move through the phases of life, and the unique - and often misunderstood - effects of female biology and hormones. Dr McKay give insights into brain development during infancy, childhood and the teenage years (including the onset of puberty) and also takes a look at mental health as well as the ageing brain. The book weaves together findings from the research lab, case studies and interviews with neuroscientists and other researchers working in the disciplines of neuroendocrinology, brain development, brain health and ageing. This comprehensive guide explores the brain during significant life stages, including: In utero Childhood Puberty The Menstrual Cycle The Teenage Brain Depression and Anxiety Pregnancy and Motherhood Menopause The Ageing Brain
Author: Tom Kirkwood
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0195350006
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 288
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Book Description
By the year 2050 one in five of the world's population will be 65 or older, a fact which presages profound medical, biological, philosophical, and political changes in the coming century. In Time of Our Lives, Tom Kirkwood draws on more than twenty years of research to make sense of the evolution of aging, to explain how aging occurs, and to answer fundamental questions like why women live longer than men. He shows that we age because our genes, evolving at a time when life was "nasty, brutish, and short," placed little priority on the long-term maintenance of our bodies. With such knowledge, along with new insights from genome research, we can devise ways to target the root causes of aging and of age-related diseases such as Alzheimer's and osteoporosis. He even considers the possibility that human beings will someday have greatly extended life spans or even be free from senescence altogether. Beautifully written by one of the world's pioneering researchers into the science of aging, Time of Our Lives is a clear, original and, above all, inspiring investigation of a process all of us experience but few of us understand.
Author: Mark E. Williams, M.D.
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 146962740X
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 241
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Book Description
In the past century, average life expectancies have nearly doubled, and today, for the first time in human history, many people have a realistic chance of living to eighty or beyond. As life expectancy increases, Americans need accurate, scientifically grounded information so that they can take full responsibility for their own later years. In The Art and Science of Aging Well, Mark E. Williams, M.D., discusses the remarkable advances that medical science has made in the field of aging and the steps that people may take to enhance their lives as they age. Through his own observations and by use of the most current medical research, Williams offers practical advice to help aging readers and those who care for them enjoy personal growth and approach aging with optimism and even joy. The Art and Science of Aging Well gives a realistic portrait of how aging occurs and provides important advice for self-improvement and philosophical, spiritual, and conscious evolution. Williams argues that we have considerable choice in determining the quality of our own old age. Refuting the perspective of aging that insists that personal, social, economic, and health care declines are persistent and inevitable, he takes a more holistic approach, revealing the multiple facets of old age. Williams provides the resources for a happy and productive later life.
Author: Thomas T. Perls
Publisher: Basic Books
ISBN: 9780465041428
Category : Self-Help
Languages : en
Pages : 0
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Book Description
Centenarians, once a rarity, are the world's fastest growing age group: there are currently about 50,000 people over 100 in the United States alone, almost three times as many as there were in 1980. Centenarians are setting the gold standard for healthy aging. What can we learn from these pioneers? How can people decades younger apply the centenarians' longevity lessons to their own lives? These are the questions Harvard scientists Thomas Perls and Margery Hutter Silver set out to answer when they launched the New England Centenarian Study.As they probed beyond disease to identify the parameters of an energetic later life, Perls and Silver realized that the key to preserving health and vitality lies not in learning how people stay young, but in understanding how they age well. By identifying lifestyle patterns, vitamins, and medications that contribute to aging well—and may even help slow down the aging process—they show how all of us can maximize the healthy portion of the life-span.Filled with personal profiles, informational sidebars, and quizzes, Living to 100 offers inspiration and solid scientific information to the more than seventy-five million people alive today who can look forward to their ninth and tenth decades.
Author: Ray Kurzweil
Publisher: Rodale
ISBN: 1605292079
Category : Health & Fitness
Languages : en
Pages : 482
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Book Description
In Transcend, famed futurist Ray Kurzweil and his coauthor Terry Grossman, MD, present a cutting edge, accessible program based on the vanguard in nutrition and science. They’ve distilled thousands of scientific studies to make the case that new developments in medicine and technology will allow us to radically extend our life expectancies and slow the aging process. Transcend gives you the practical tools you need to live long enough (and remain healthy long enough) to take full advantage of the biotech and nanotech advances that have already begun and will continue to occur at an accelerating pace during the years ahead. To help you remember the nine key components of the program, Ray and Terry have arranged them into a mnemonic: Talk with your doctor, Relaxation, Assessment, Nutrition, Supplements, Calorie reduction, Exercise, New technologies, Detoxification. This easy-to-follow program will help you transcend the boundaries of your genetic legacy and live long enough to live forever.
Author: Janet Saltzman Chafetz
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 0387362185
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 626
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Book Description
During the past three decades, feminist scholars have successfully demonstrated the ubiq uity and omnirelevance of gender as a sociocultural construction in virtually all human collectivities, past and present. Intrapsychic, interactional, and collective social processes are gendered, as are micro, meso, and macro social structures. Gender shapes, and is shaped, in all arenas of social life, from the most mundane practices of everyday life to those of the most powerful corporate actors. Contemporary understandings of gender emanate from a large community of primarily feminist scholars that spans the gamut of learned disciplines and also includes non-academic activist thinkers. However, while in corporating some cross-disciplinary material, this volume focuses specifically on socio logical theories and research concerning gender, which are discussed across the full array of social processes, structures, and institutions. As editor, I have explicitly tried to shape the contributions to this volume along several lines that reflect my long-standing views about sociology in general, and gender sociology in particular. First, I asked authors to include cross-national and historical material as much as possible. This request reflects my belief that understanding and evaluating the here-and-now and working realistically for a better future can only be accomplished from a comparative perspective. Too often, American sociology has been both tempero- and ethnocentric. Second, I have asked authors to be sensitive to within-gender differences along class, racial/ethnic, sexual preference, and age cohort lines.
Author: Claudia Goldin
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022653264X
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 326
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Book Description
Today, more American women than ever before stay in the workforce into their sixties and seventies. This trend emerged in the 1980s, and has persisted during the past three decades, despite substantial changes in macroeconomic conditions. Why is this so? Today’s older American women work full-time jobs at greater rates than women in other developed countries. In Women Working Longer, editors Claudia Goldin and Lawrence F. Katz assemble new research that presents fresh insights on the phenomenon of working longer. Their findings suggest that education and work experience earlier in life are connected to women’s later-in-life work. Other contributors to the volume investigate additional factors that may play a role in late-life labor supply, such as marital disruption, household finances, and access to retirement benefits. A pioneering study of recent trends in older women’s labor force participation, this collection offers insights valuable to a wide array of social scientists, employers, and policy makers.
