LiveLongAgeWell

You may think that getting older means becoming less happy, but various studies, including this new one just released at the American Psychological Association (APA) meeting in Toronto, show just the opposite: most people actually become happier as they get older. Good news, especially as the fastest growing population segment—in the U.S. at least—is people over age 85.

This APA study from the University of California found two exceptions to the older=happier correlation. First are people dealing with dementia, and second are people stuck in a long-term stressful situation without escape, for example, a debilitating chronic disease.

Most of us, however, can look forward to greater happiness as we get older. The researchers felt that a main reason for that is that over time, we learn from experience what makes us stressed or unhappy, and we become better at avoiding or just ignoring those people or situations.

More from the APA Meeting

Two other interesting presentations at the APA …One a large Swedish study demonstrating that those adults who have a “strong social network” were 60% less likely to become demented over time.

The second one sounds obvious, yet is something frequently ignored—that many people who seem to be getting mentally slower are really not; it’s just that their hearing has slowly dropped, making them seem dim-witted. Be aware that many older folks are embarrassed to admit a hearing problem, so keep this in mind regarding your own family. If you notice someone losing sharpness over time, one of the first things to test is hearing.

“Sham” Vertebral Procedure and the Placebo Effect

The best possible research study is a “double-blind clinical trial”, and a typical trial like this involves splitting up a group of people into two equal groups, and giving one group an active drug, and the other group an inactive drug (placebo) and then comparing the outcome of the two groups over time. Unfortunately, since these studies are expensive and time-consuming, a majority of research studies are not true clinical trials, and surgical clinical trials involving placebo, or “sham” surgery, is exceedingly rare.

Sham surgery is complex in many ways; you can imagine trying to convince one half of a study group that they really had surgery, when in fact they had nothing more than an incision made, or an anesthetic shot given, rather than a full operation.

So I can’t recall the last time I read about a sham surgery clinical trial, but one was just completed by a team from Australia, Britain, and the U.S. The goal was to learn if vertebroplasty, a common back procedure (to decrease pain in vertebral fracture patients) was actually effective, or the improvement seen was just a placebo effect.

The researchers performed the full procedure on one half of the patients, involving an anesthetic shot and injecting bone cement into the fractured vertebra. The 50% of patients who had the sham procedure had the anesthetic shot but no cement was placed. To add realism to the sham group, the doctors had the cement in the room to give the same smell sensation as the real procedure.

The result was that the sham surgery group did just as well, with just as much improvement, as the ones who had the full procedure. For more details, look at this full summary in the New York Times. And if you have doubts about the efficacy of a procedure or operation your doctor suggests, you might ask “what clinical trials have been done, if any, to show this procedure is effective?” Your doc will be surprised, but should be able to answer.

Finally….it seems a number of research papers in the past decade have been “ghostwritten” by medical marketing companies rather than doctors. (This is probably no surprise to most doctors, but I suspect it might be for the general public.) In these cases the drug company hires a marketing company to write a paper with a positive spin on whatever they are selling or wanting to sell. Note that if the research did not turn out in their favor, they just wouldn’t publish it.

After the marketing writer finishes his favorable report, the doctor(s) may just look the paper over and make a few changes, but often the report is tailor-made to suit the drug company. Amazing how medicine has changed over the years, and how doctors can be bought off. Supposedly this practice, now exposed, will stop, but I doubt it.