Old age

Just found this among the most e-mailed articles in the last two months from New York times. Excerpts;
"The question is why some age well and others do not, often heading along a path that ends up in a medical condition known as frailty.
....
Frailty, Dr. Harris explains, involves exhaustion, weakness, weight loss and a loss of muscle mass and strength. It is, she says, a grim prognosis whose causes were little understood.
...
Investigators say that there is a ray of hope in the finding — if cardiovascular disease is central to many of the symptoms of old age, it should be possible to slow or delay or even prevent many of these changes by treating the medical condition.

A second finding is just as surprising to skeptical scientists because it seemed to many like a wrongheaded cliché — you’re only as old as you think you are. Rigorous studies are now showing that seeing, or hearing, gloomy nostrums about what it is like to be old can make people walk more slowly, hear and remember less well, and even affect their cardiovascular systems. Positive images of aging have the opposite effects. The constant message that old people are expected to be slow and weak and forgetful is not a reason for the full-blown frailty syndrome. But it may help push people along that path."

But aging seems real. Today after about 10 trips with the wheelbarrow from the front of the house to the back to mulch the garden, I am exhausted. It did not happen a few years ago. May be it is smoking. But then both my grandfathers were smokers and were farming until they were almost eighty.