Filed under: Anti-Aging For Men
Hearing
Hearing impairment with age can be normally mild or moderate in severity, yet it tends to be a widespread problem. Such problems begin to show up in midlife. These difficulties have a number of causes and can have various effects. In some cases, as in losses in ability to hear high-pitched sound, the causes are self-inflicted, stemming from having sampled too many rock concerts. Other problems are hereditary in nature. Still others are due to normal changes associated with aging that affect all of us differently.
Background Noise
As we age, we lose the ability to tune out background noises. Consequently, we frequently have greater difficulty hearing in noisy settings. This would affect your ability to hear a friend trying to get your attention across a crowded room. This is a difficult problem to overcome. Hearing aids tend to amplify sound indiscriminately, leaving up to you the problem of separating those sounds you want to hear from those you don’t. You can only hope that your particular case is mild and uncomplicated by other hearing problems.
High-Pitch Hearing Loss
There are plenty of reasons why anyone who has spent time around high-pitched noises ends up testing positive for high-frequency hearing loss. Call it “rock ‘n roller’s ear.” Individuals working around foundries, boiler making, or loud noises such as gunfire may also flunk hearing tests for high-pitched frequencies. Such problems, fortunately, may be treatable with a myriad of types of hearing aids or, as a last resort, surgery. Researchers even have developed an implantable synthetic cochlea (the balance center of the ear) already.
More important, high-pitched hearing loss is preventable just by wearing noise-deadening ear protection. For this reason, airport personnel exposed to high-pitched sounds of aircraft engines or municipal workers using a myriad of machinery should have ear protection in place. anti-aging winter park
Filed under: Anti-Aging For Men
Eyes
Okay, so your eye problems aren’t figments of your imagination. Middle agethat is, turning 40-somethingappears to be the critical age for a lot of light-to-moderate nastiness having to do with your eyes. The most noticeable change as we age is in our visual acuity, especially close up, or “near vision.” It seems that our arms have become too short. Then, too, as we get older, night driving becomes more difficult because we become hypersensitive to glare. There are other potential problems, but these are the most common.
The dimensions of vision most commonly affected by age are the following:
visual processing speed (reading speed)
light sensitivity (the ability to see in twilight or dark)
dynamic vision (like reading scrolling TV credits)
near vision (for small print)
visual search (like locating a sign)
Let’s get down to cases. According to Timothy Diegel, MD, clinical associate professor of ophthalmology at the University of Minnesota, “Turning 40 is a time of accommodative weakness.” In other words, you experience decreased eye (visual) function but usually adapt to it effectively so that you may not even notice it.
This means many things, from a vision perspective. As we age, for example, the cornea begins to flatten, accentuating any earlier astigmatism. Our lenses, devoid of their own blood supply, are especially sensitive already to any form of insulttraumatic, toxic, or degenerativeand may develop dullness or actual visual disability. With age, we all lose the ability to increase the thickness or curvature of the lens in order to focus on near objects. Tell me about it. You know something’s seriously wrong when you have to ask your dinner partner on the other side of the table to hold your menu so that you can read it.
Another hazard of aging is dry eyes. When you’re tired or have been exposed to cold air, wind, toxic fumes, or rain, contacts can become unpleasant or impossible to wear. Individuals spend their entire workday within high-rise offices cursed with low humidity and windows that won’t open. Humidifiers, of course, are now verboten because of code restrictions. They have been known to cause other inconveniences such as a sometimes fatal pneumonia called Legionnaire’s disease. The books say that the average humidity in the Sahara Desert is somewhere in the neighborhood of 37 percent. In the average office building in the wintertime, it’s more like 20 percent. Either way, you have to choose between perpetually dry eyes or risk a humidifier and a big-time fine.
Artificial tears or thick rewetting drops are a preventive, if not simplistic, answer to keratoconjunctivitis sicca (dry eyes). If you are going to spend an extended amount of time outdoors, load up on these thick moisteners.
Ever heard of “floaters?” These are vitreous particles, shaped like dots, lines, and even cobwebs, that can make the sun’s rays painful to the eyes. In the least, they are distracting, but they can lead to more serious problems. Such possibilities include a retinal detachment, or worse yet, vitreal hemorrhage. If someone has floaters that are in fact annoying, a retinal vitreous surgeon has techniques for removing them by inserting needles (painlessly), aspirating the floaters out, and then replacing the fluid with a balanced salt solution.
Eyelids, too, can literally begin to turn on you in midlife. Eyelids that begin to turn in (entropian) or out (ectropian) may produce excessive tearing or painful redness. Because the eyelids are a perfect barrier catching the sun’s rays first, they are also a perfect setup for basal cell carcinoma (that is what a raised, reddening, pearly bump on the eyelid ends up being 90 percent of the time, especially if you are fair-skinned and blue-eyed). The cure for most of these problems of the lids can be straightforward: excision. Fortunately, these are annoying enough that most people don’t wait too long before getting them checked out.
Protect your eyes. There are plenty of state-of-the-art breakproof (polycarbonate) lenses and breakaway frames that will not become a part of your permanent bone structure in a face plant. They can also prevent a lacerated eyeball from a ski pole tip or a swinging branch.
Some eye problems, such as near visual acuity trouble, can easily be overcome by getting reading glasses or bifocals. The others you may just have to get used to, just as you have of all those wrinkles you see in the mirror every morning. anti-aging medicine
Filed under: Anti-Aging For Men
Stroke
When a vessel in the brain hemorrhages and blood goes smashing about where it doesn’t belong, the result can be irreparable damage to brain tissue. Increased pressure on the brain can have profound effects on the health of the entire nervous system, the brain itself, or, more significantly, actual deadly pressure on the brain stem.
When it comes to the broad and important category of cerebrovascular diseases, the U.S. government’s Framingham study, which has tracked more than 5,000 adult residents of Framingham, Massachusetts, since the late 1940s, found hypertension, either systolic or diastolic, to be the most important risk factor producing strokes. Because African-American males demonstrate the highest incidence of essential hypertension (of unknown cause, yet treatable), it should come as no surprise that this same group has the highest incidence of strokes.
Other risk factors that the aging male can eliminate by an occasional visit to the doctor include diabetes, a high cholesterol and triglyceride, or cigarette smoking. The incidence of strokes has declined largely owing to the more vigorous preventive approaches being taken. This may well represent one of the areas where epidemiology and hands-on medicine have worked successfully together to treat disease.
The initial approach to anyone unfortunate enough to have developed a stroke is supportive care. This is because at first there is a great deal of swelling or edema, which can accentuate the severity of the usual findings from a stroke. At its worst, the edema can affect the respiratory center and compromise usually automatic or involuntary breathing.
During this time, steroids and mannitol, a large-molecule sugar, can be given to shrink swelling. During the acute phase of the stroke, there should be careful attention to the breakdown of skin (decubiti), which can develop over mere hours; the prevention of urinary retention; and the psychological needs of the impaired patient. If the stroke involves Broca’s speech area on the left side of the brain, the stroke victim usually has an expressive aphasia (unable to express oneself verbally) in addition to a possibly complete flaccid paralysis of the opposite side of the body.
There are the plenty who will have a stroke and return to very near their earlier level. The changes may be very subtle: a dragging foot or an arm and hand pulled up and barely functional from contractures. They may have a persistent facial droop, not altogether unlike what one sees in someone with a Bell’s (a peripheral seventh cranial nerve) palsy. Classically, someone with a typical central stroke will deflect the movement of their tongue to the side of the stroke. anti aging formula
