The very definition of aging has changed – not everyone above the age of 65 is old. , Photo credit: Getty Images/iStockphoto
“B”By the way, don’t open the porcelain box,” said the man before leaving the house. Pandora opened the box, and according to Greek mythology, took away all human afflictions—from infirmity to aging, from disease to Up to the pestilence, everything. He hurriedly closed the lid in panic. He didn’t realize that the remedies of youth, hope, health and happiness lay at the bottom of the box.
In 1961, Leonard Hayflick, an American scientist from Philadelphia, made a surprising discovery. In the laboratory, cultured human cells can divide up to 50 times and then die.
Chromosomes, the coiled structures inside our cells that contain our genetic code, have a protective “shoe” at the end called a telomere, to prevent the edges from fraying during cell division. In 1980, Elizabeth Blackburn from Australia proved that Tetrahymena, a single-celled organism, could be immortalized in a lab petridish by a constant supply of telomerase, an enzyme that preserves the sole of the telomere “shoe”. Biological immortality was now visible at the cellular level. This discovery earned him the Nobel Prize in 2009.
Token 32 came riding into my consulting room in a stainless steel wheel-chair, a frail, elderly woman, with “salt-pepper” disheveled hair, “crow’s-feet” side trim; And a wrinkled silk saree with a matching blouse draped over her torso. She was not in any financial bankruptcy.
“How are you mom?” I try to greet him with a smile, playing the best I could at 2.30 in the afternoon.
“I am unwell son, aches and pains everywhere, unable to walk, all effects of old age,” declared the patient.
It was only when I looked at her medical records that it hit me: She’s my age, my age! Either her telomeres are bad, or my hair dye is good. But self-grooming is much more than skin cream and hair dye. See a rodent, a lab animal, a cat or a dog. It spends a lot of time self-grooming. Licking, rubbing, scratching – in every possible way he tries to keep himself clean. It is vital to its survival by preventing infection and parasites. A lab animal that stops grooming itself is a sign that it is sick and about to die. Self grooming in humans has evolved a lot from bathing and brushing to fairness creams and hair colours. Self-grooming improves self-esteem, but there is more to it. It improves self-perception, not just what others think of you, but what you think of yourself. A movie star, worried about how people see her (displayed self-image), is not what we are talking about. It is what you think of yourself (Mirror Self Image). A distorted mirror self-image is a problem.
The very definition of aging has changed – not everyone above the age of 65 is old. People between 65 and 75 are “young oldies”, 75 to 85 “middle old”, and those over 85 are “old old”. In countries such as Japan, there are many healthy and fit “elders”, proving that aging doesn’t necessarily make you unwell. Bright and active people like biologist Richard Dawkins (82), thinker Daniel Kahneman (88) and linguist Noam Chomsky (91) prove this point. This led researchers to come up with the concept of blame. Frailty is a combination of difficulty with movement (amnesia), slow thinking or poor memory (cognition), loss of muscle and bone mass, and difficulty with activities of daily living. Detailed scores exist to measure vulnerabilities. While it is only 10% for those aged between 65 and 75, the fault percentage rises to 25% for those over 85.
The US National Health and Aging Trends Study of 4,800 patients at Johns Hopkins University in 2021 showed those with low self-esteem and self-perception scores at the start of the study had a 41% higher risk of developing frailty at a seven-year follow-up. -UP. So take care of your image yourself. As trainer Tom Hopkins says, “You are your greatest asset. Invest your time, effort and money in grooming yourself. Not for the appreciation of others, but for your health.”
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