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Purposely Live to120

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Tag Archives: Life Expetancy

#47 – What does optimal dental health look like and how to achieve it?

06 Sunday Dec 2015

Posted by purposelyliveto120 in Living to 120, Optimal Health, Uncategorized, Vitality, wellness

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Life Expetancy, living to 120, optimal health, Preventative Care, Vitality

A couple of years ago, during one of my regular visits to my dentist, I told him that my goal is to live to 120 and wanted to make sure that my teeth will last and stay healthy until then.

He immediately turned to me hygienist and said, “Dr. Thareja here has just given us permission to challenge him to do everything he needs to do for optimal dental health.”

Now I was 35 years old when I visited a dentist for the first time. You see, I grew up in India. My parents taught me that all I needed to do was brush my teeth every day and my teeth will be just fine. But something bothered me all the time.  Both my parents had lost most of their teeth when they were in their forties. They had gotten the last few pulled out so that they could get fitted with dentures.

Turning 35, even though nothing was hurting, I realized that I did not cherish the thought of having dentures in my forties.  Hence the first visit to the dentist.

The dentist was surprised to learn that I had never seen a dentist until that day.  He did a thorough cleaning. Although there was bleeding and pain during the cleaning, there were really no issues – no cavities, no gum disease etc. He told me to regularly brush and floss.

I bought floss and tried it for a few times. I did not really know how to do the flossing or what good it was doing. I did a little bit of reading, but gingivitis, tartar, gum disease, plaque these words did not seem to make any sense to me. So, I stopped flossing and went back to just brushing my teeth. And, continued with my once a year visit with the dentist.

Few years later, a dentist moved into our office building it. I decided to try him out.  My very first visit with Dr. Doug Drewyer’s office was quite different. He asked me that they would like to measure my gum separation before doing the cleaning. After the hygienist had done the measurements, Dr. Doug explained the significance of the measurements. He showed me that for certain teeth gums had separated much more. And, that was not good.

My next question was obvious: What could I do to prevent this gums separating from the teeth?  He told me the key was flossing. Since with flossing, you scrape off any plaque that might cause gums to inflame, lose vitality in the tissue and start separating from the teeth and eventually result in teeth falling out – even when the teeth themselves are healthy.

So then it finally made sense to me: So that’s how my parents lost their healthy teeth even when they were brushing every day!! 

Initially, Dr. Doug told me to floss just twice a week and then three times a week and then every day.  I later learned that he was taking this incremental approach to not overwhelm me.  His experience is that if he tells patients to floss every day on the first visit, very few are able to do that.

You may have heard the dentist joke.  Someone asks his dentist, “Which teeth should I floss?”  Dentist’s snap answer, “Only the ones you want to keep!”

Researching for this blog, I found a website called Mouth Healthy, sponsored by American Dental Association. It has a lot of very user-friendly information that explains all those things that I was trying to learn 15 to 20 years ago. And, if you are not familiar with these basis terms, here is a quick overview:

Your teeth are covered with a sticky film called plaque that can contribute to tooth decay and gum disease. Plaque contains bacteria, which following a meal or snack containing sugar can release acids that attack tooth enamel. Repeated attacks can cause the enamel to break down, eventually resulting in cavities. Check out these fascinating (or disgusting?) pictures of plaque attack close up.

Cavities, or tooth decay, is the destruction of your tooth enamel, the hard, outer layer of your teeth. It can be a problem for children, teens and adults. Plaque, a sticky film of bacteria, constantly forms on your teeth. When you eat or drink foods containing sugars, the bacteria in plaque produce acids that attack tooth enamel. The stickiness of the plaque keeps these acids in contact with your teeth and over time the enamel can break down. This is when cavities can form. A cavity is a little hole in your tooth.

Cavities are more common among children, but changes that occur with aging make cavities an adult problem, too. Recession of the gums away from the teeth, combined with an increased incidence of gum disease, can expose tooth roots to plaque. Tooth roots are covered with cementum, a softer tissue than enamel. They are susceptible to decay and are more sensitive to touch and to hot and cold. It’s common for people over age 50 to have tooth-root decay.

Decay around the edges, or a margin, of fillings is also common for older adults. Because many older adults lacked benefits of fluoride and modern preventive dental care when they were growing up, they often have a number of dental fillings. Over the years, these fillings may weaken and tend to fracture and leak around the edges. Bacteria accumulate in these tiny crevices causing acid to build up which leads to decay.

Decay can also be the result of dry mouth, which can be caused by certain medication or other health issues.

Plaque that is not removed with thorough daily brushing and cleaning between teeth can eventually harden into calculus or tartar. This makes it more difficult to keep your teeth clean. When tartar collects above the gum line, the gum tissue can become swollen and may bleed easily. This is called gingivitis.

Gingivitis is the early stage of gum disease. Gum disease, also known as periodontal disease, is an infection of the tissues that surround your teeth, and is caused by a buildup of plaque. In its early stages, symptoms may include:

  • gums that bleed easily
  • red, swollen, tender gums
  • bad breath

Some factors that can put you at higher risk of developing gingivitis include:

  • poor dental care
  • smoking or chewing tobacco
  • genetics
  • crooked teeth that are hard to keep clean
  • pregnancy
  • diabetes
  • medications, including steroids, certain types of anti-epilepsy drugs, cancer therapy drugs, some calcium channel blockers and oral contraceptives

Take care of your gums…help your heart?

The American Heart Association published a Statement in April 2012 supporting an association between gum disease and heart disease. The article noted that current scientific data do not indicate if regular brushing and flossing or treatment of gum disease will decrease the incidence, rate or severity of the narrowing of the arteries (called atherosclerosis) that can lead to heart attacks and strokes. However, many studies show an as-yet-unexplained association between gum disease and several serious health conditions, including heart disease, even after adjusting for common risk factors.

You may have seen health and lifestyle surveys used for estimating life-expectancy that want to know if you floss daily. If you do the models give you credit for an extra 2 to 4 years of life.

You may have seen commercial or ads for chewing gum claiming better dental health from chewing gum.  What is that about? Saliva, or spit, plays a significant role in maintaining oral health. It is derived from blood and acts as the bloodstream of the mouth. What this means is, like blood, saliva helps build and maintain the health of soft and hard tissues. When saliva flow is reduced oral health problems such as tooth decay and other oral infections can occur. Chewing is the most efficient way to stimulate salivary flow. It causes muscles to compress the salivary glands and release saliva. Saliva

  • Washes away food and debris from teeth and gums
  • Helps moisten and break down food to ease swallowing and enhances ability to taste
  • Provides disease-fighting substances throughout your mouth to help prevent cavities and other infections
  • Helps keep the surface of your teeth strong by providing high levels of calcium, fluoride and phosphate ions at the tooth surface.

Bottom Line

So, when I asked Dr. Doug to tell me everything I need to do to have my teeth until 120, he incrementally added a suggestion of using tiny gum brush to catch plaque that floss might not catch. But other than that he reinforced the same things that he has told me before – which is very consistent with everything I have learned through my research.

You can help prevent tooth decay, cavities, gum disease etc. and keep healthy teeth for life by following these tips:

  1. Brush twice a day with fluoride toothpaste.
  2. Clean between your teeth daily with floss or interdental cleaner.
  3. Eat nutritious and balanced meals and limit snacking.
  4. Check with your dentist about the use of supplemental fluoride, which strengthens your teeth, and about use of dental sealants (a plastic protective coating) applied to the chewing surfaces of the back teeth (where decay often starts) to protect them from decay.
  5. Visit your dentist regularly for professional cleanings and oral examination.

And, if you are not sure how exactly to floss, here are instructions from National Institute of Dental and Craniofacial Research: PLAQUE: What it is and how to get rid of it.  You will notice that NIH also recommends brushing (or scraping) tongue in addition to the teeth.

I can tell you from my experience that the above list of five steps works. These days my twice annual dentist cleaning visits are basically cleaning stains and some scarping and very little, if any, pain, bleeding or discomfort. And, it has been getting better over time.

What are your thoughts and experience on maintaining optimal dental health?

I would love to learn from you.

Post #41 – So, how to measure how close to optimal is your health? Or, how quickly are you aging?

19 Sunday Jul 2015

Posted by purposelyliveto120 in Aging, Dying, Life-Span, Living to 120, Mental Health, Nutrition, Optimal Exercise, Puposely Living, Vitality, wellness

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

Aging, Biomarkers, Cholesterol, Dying, Health Span, Life Expetancy, Life Span, Live to 120

“How old are you?” someone asks. Number of years since birth is the generally the answer – that is your Chronological Age or CA.

But how hold do you feel? How old do you act? How old do you look? That is your Biological Age or BA.

Wouldn’t it be nice to actually be able to measure your biological age?

CA and BA is the difference between being 40 year old and going on 60. Or, may be being 60 year old and going on 40.

Wouldn’t it be more useful to have a single number like BA, than understanding individual factors like your total cholesterol, HDL, A1c, VO2 Max, etc?

Recently, in the media there has been a buzz about a recent research published by scientists led by Duke University School of Medicine about measuring biological age. For example, see the article in WSJ: How Quickly Are You Growing Old?

Now there are a quite a few websites, where you answer a bunch of question and they will tell you, your biological age as compared to your chronological age.

For example, here are three such sites, I tried (my CA is 60.9 years):

http://www.biological-age.com/ calculated my biological age as 36

https://www.sharecare.com told me my BA was 53.6.

http://www.growyouthful.com/gettestinfo.php said my BA was 46.

Each of the sites followed up with advice and helpful hints on what I could start or stop doing to further increase my expected health and lifespan.

Unfortunately, none of these websites show exactly what they do with the information you provide and how they arrive at the number they call Biological Age.

But this recent study, “Quantification of biological aging in young adults”, by Daniel W. Belsky et al, is very rigorous treatment of this subject and gives you all the details behind the curtain. And, for me, these details are not only fascinating but actually quite useful to understand what matters for biological age to start diverging from chronological age. In other words, what slows down or speed up aging.

The study calculated the aging rate of 954 men and women—taking various measurements of their bodies’ health—when they were each 26, 32 and 38 in chronological years. By analyzing how these measures changed over time, the researchers were able to see who aged faster and who slower than normal.

To measure the pace of biological aging, which the study defined as the declining integrity of multiple organ systems, the researchers relied on 18 separate biomarkers, summarized in figure below.

These ranged from common measures such as HDL-cholesterol levels and mean arterial blood pressure to more obscure ones like the length of telomeres—the protective caps on the ends of chromosomes that shorten with age.

Go on in Years

Chronological age of all participants was 38 years. However, researchers found that the biological ages varied from 26 years to 60 years.

For measuring how fast people aged, they calculated aging over 12 years. About 30 percent aged biologically one year for every calendar year. There were those who aged as much as 3 years for every calendar year. And, there were four members of the group who aged not at all or actually got biologically younger during the 12 year period.

BOTTOMLINE:

Finding one’s Biological Age is a fascinating concept and can be very useful in optimizing health and life span. However, this is not an exact science just yet, although good strides are being made in research.

However, if you want to focus on living optimally, you can focus on changing your lifestyle to optimize the basic 18 or so biomarkers used in this study. Most of these can be impacted by lifestyle choices. Only 20% depend upon genetics.

Proper food, hydration, exercise, supplements and medical care are the key methods to managing these primary biomarkers.

Websites that compute biological ages also suggest additional actionable items that seem to strongly correlate to optimal health span and life span. These include:

  1. Optimal sleep (7 to 9 hours)
  2. Reduced stress (meditation, perspective management)
  3. Reduced exposure to toxins (organic food, reduced use of chemicals, clean water)
  4. Increased social contact (having friends, family, living with a life partner)
  5. Purposeful living (satisfying work, hobbies, social endeavors)

What is your take on this subject?

Please feel free to leave comment to share your perspective.

Post #5 – Why do I want to live to 120?

31 Monday Mar 2014

Posted by purposelyliveto120 in Aging, Life-Span, Living to 120, Uncategorized

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Tags

Life Expetancy, Life Span, Live to 120, living to 120, purpose of life

As I start this conversation of purposely living to 120, I usually get a wide variety of reaction from people. Frankly, the one that took me by surprise the first time I heard, and, to some extent, still does is, “Why would you want to live to 120 even if you could?”

Now, I have to admit, before I started to get into such conversations, I just naively assumed that most people wanted to live as long as possible. After all, just look at the heroic efforts doctors, hospitals and patients put up to extend life just by few years, months and often even days.

When I was discussing this topic with my father-in-law recently, he remarked, “I will be happy to die at 90.” Then he quickly calculated and figured out that that was only 13 years away. So, he immediately added, “Wait a minute. That seems too soon. Scratch that thought. Let us make it 95.”

My mother-in-law on the other hand queried, “I’m wondering if anyone has interviewed those very old people to determine if they would have chosen to live to 120 or more, had there been a choice. Also curious to know why you would make that choice [of living to 120], since the possibility of your peers and loved ones not being with you seems to be very real. Or do you anticipate the “community” being a replacement for others?”

According to a detailed survey Pew Research Center conducted last year, comments of my in-laws are well represented in the mainstream of views across the US. As the following figures show, only 38% of people in the US would want to live to 120 and most Americans expect to live to between 85 to 90 years.

Figure 5-1

Figure 5-2

Only about 4% feel that ideal lifespan is between 100 and 120 and another 4% think it is over 120.

Figure 5-3

A majority of people think that living to 120 will be a bad thing for society.

Figure 5-4

A surprising result survey researchers noted is that most of these measures are fairly constant across various religions, gender, education or political party affiliations in America.

In my conversations, I have found that three reasons come up most often when people mull over if they personally want to live to 120:

  1. What would be the condition of their personal health? Will it be joyful living or a painful living?
  2. Will they have financial means to sustain themselves? Being broke is not much fun.
  3. Will their peers and loved ones be around? If not, will it be worth living?

As for myself personally, I feel that there are two major objectives of life: Growth and Contribution.

Thus my rationale for wanting to live to 120 is to simply maximize the time I have available to grow and contribute. Additionally, purposely living to 120, learning some things along the way, sharing with others as I learn, seem to fit in with my personal growth and contribution model of life.

In this sort of context, I see the three common objections cited above, as challenges to overcome as I pursue the goal of purposely living to 120. Moreover, not only I want to live to 120, but I wish to do it healthfully, purposefully and joyfully.

Looking at it another way, I feel, if it is okay to expect to get to 90 healthfully, purposefully and joyfully, why not to 120?

And, of course, as my mother-in-laws suspected, a key purpose for me to write this blog and engage in conversations with family, friends, loved ones is to motivate them and along the way find others who would want to share this journey together.

How do you feel about living to 120?

What do you think it would take to live to 120 healthfully, purposefully, and joyfully?

Please leave comments to this post. I and others following this blog would love to hear your perspective!

Post #4 – Is it even possible to live to 120? – Part II

23 Sunday Mar 2014

Posted by purposelyliveto120 in Dying, Life-Span, Living to 120

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

Aging, Dying, Life Expetancy, Life Span, living to 120

In the last post on this topic, I concluded that

“As an optimist, when I look at this data, it looks very encouraging to me. First, it is definitely viable to live to 120. It has already been done! Like the four-minute mile, someone has already shown the way.

Second, an increasing number of people are approaching that age with an increasing rate. So, at this rate, I expect by the time my time arrives, dying at 120 will be as routine as dying at 100 today! It might not be very common, but it might not be that rare.”

While I make this informal and what seems like a rather obvious deduction from the data, some folks disagree.

James F. Fries and Lawrence M. Crapo in their book on Vitality and Aging make a compelling argument: while life expectancy has been increasing over the last many decades life-span has been fixed (for all practical purposes – increasing only by 0.1 year per century).

So, intuitively, the chart below may be how one would be tempted to guess the shape of life expectancy curves.

Figure 1
However, they argue, that it is the chart below that corresponds to the reality.

Figure 2

Thus according to their conclusion, while on an average humans are living longer and longer, we are still stuck at dying by the age of 100.

Presenting the data from another perspective in the chart below, as we graph number of deaths against age of death, we observe a normal or Gaussian distribution around certain age at which number of deaths peak. As the life expectancy keeps increasing the curve would look like the IDEAL curve below.

Figure 3

And, as that happens, graph of percent survial rate against age will become “rectanguar” as shown below.

Figure 4

This implies that as we conquer chronic diseases, we will live a healthy long life after which we will succumb very quickly to the forces of nature, within the bounds of a very few years. And, that will define an ideal “natural” death. As we hit certain time limit, all of the cells in the body may burst together like soap bubbles.

Fries and Crapo wrote their book in 1981. So I thought, with all the new research in the last 30+ years, maybe they have changed their mind.

In a more recent review article in the Journal of Aging Research, Compression of Morbidity 1980–2011: A Focused Review of Paradigms and Progress, James F. Fries, Bonnie Bruce, and Eliza Chakravarty reassert the same conclusion and buttress it with more recent studies.

I really like most everything else they assert, derive or conclude in that book- which I would like to talk about in a different post. However, I am personally not sold on this idea of fixed life-span.

It makes me quite uncomfortable. Yeah, you guessed it. After all, my goal is to purposely live to 120!

What do you think?

Have you seen any data, studies or analysis that contradicts this theory about fixed life-span?

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