The Colorado Department of Labor and Employment says nearly 25 percent of all Coloradans 65 or older are still working, reports Colorado Public Radio . Janine Vanderburg seeks to combat ageism threatening older adults' employment via her Changing the Narrative campaign. Thirty-three percent of Colorado utility workers are older than 55, as are 25 percent of employees in education, agriculture, and transportation. Vanderburg stresses that unsubstantiated generational stereotypes about older workers — ranging from digital incompetence and unwillingness to learn to higher costs and poorer health — jeopardize their job prospects. Changing the Narrative hosts workshops, management training sessions, and other outreach programs as support for senior workers. "We . . . know that deliberately creating multi-generational workplaces is a really effective business practice," Vanderburg notes. "You bring in that accumulated wisdom, that older people have, as well as some of that skill and ability to collaborate that younger people may be bringing to the workplace. If you put them together, it's really good for business."

Researchers are exploring drugs to destroy so-called "zombie cells" that studies suggest promote aging and age-related deterioration, reports Fox News . Senescent cells start out normal but then encounter stressors, such as DNA damage or viral infection, which either kill them or turn them into zombie cells. These cells can release chemicals that damage normal cells, and drugs that eliminate such cells in mouse studies have helped relieve maladies like cataracts, diabetes, osteoporosis, Alzheimer's, heart enlargement, kidney problems, clogged arteries, and age-related muscular deterioration. Administering such drugs to aged mice improved walking speed, grip strength, and treadmill endurance. In extremely old mice, the drugs extended lifespan by 36 percent, on average. The first human study on zombie-cell drug treatment involved 14 participants with idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis, who after three weeks improved on some physical-fitness measures, such as walking speed, but did not improve on others.

Framingham Heart Study researcher Rhoda Au is using digital voice recordings and a digital pen to determine whether changes in Framingham, Mass., residents' voices or how they write could help predict their risk of Alzheimer's, reports Being Patient . "I realized there's a richness in participants' response to neuropsychological tests," Au recalls. She says in recording their responses over the years, she learned the voice itself offers valuable data. "When you are testing people, you can hear differences over time," Au notes. "They may still test well, but they're starting to hesitate, have more difficulty finding the right word, they may choose a different one. There's lots of strategies people can have that makes them still look like they normally are, but that they're starting to shift." Voice analysis focusing on speech text features, audio qualities like pitch or tone shifts, hesitation, pauses, stutters, and fragmented sentences could differentiate cognitively impaired and normal subjects. Au adds that the writing analysis test involves a digital pen, then reading the pen strokes as derived measures. The procedure is designed to spot decision-making latencies, which as they grow longer may reflect changes in the subject's cognitive-processing ability.

European Space Agency (ESA) scientists will conduct an experiment on the International Space Station to explore the potential for man-made nanoparticles to slow human aging by countering free radicals, reports the New York Post . Free radicals are renegade molecules containing unpaired electrons that can damage other molecules by poaching electrons, a process known as oxidative stress. The ESA experiment will assess how well the nanoparticles can ingest these atoms, reducing their cumulative damage. The project aims to ensure the health of astronauts during prolonged space flights to destinations such as Mars or beyond. The experiment is being conducted in a large "incubator" filled with samples that will be frozen for a return to Earth later on. Its results could inform future plans for space missions, and possibly offer insights on retarding the aging process in general.

A study published in Health Affairs focused on how many middle-income American seniors will be caught in a financial quagmire of needing long-term care but unable to afford it, reports the New York Times . Using data from the national Health and Retirement Study, including personal income and assets and health status, the researchers defined the middle-income cohort as Americans from the 41st to the 80th percentile in terms of financial resources. In 2029, for people 75 to 84 — the age range when they are likely to need long-term care — this would mean access to about $25,000 to $74,000 annually in current dollars. Past age 85, the middle-income category extends to $95,000. About 14.4 million people will fall into the middle-income category, which is almost double the current population. A decade from now, 80 percent of middle-income seniors will have less than $60,000 a year in income and assets, not including equity in their homes. Yet the estimated cost of assisted living plus out-of-pocket medical expenses will hit $62,000 per year, by the researchers' conservative estimate.

According to AARP's Emily Allen, approximately three million older Americans are currently seeking full-time employment, with their inability to obtain high-paying jobs partially — perhaps largely — a reflection of ageism, reports the Greenwich Time . "For older workers, the thought of going back to school or continual learning wasn't in the mindset," she noted. "It had been that very traditional mindset of school, graduate, work, retire. We had to switch mindsets on the part of older workers to say it's about continual learning." Firing and replacing workers with different skills costs companies billions in lost productivity, severance packages, and recruiting, and re-skilling current employees is a cost-effective option. However, Accenture reports that although 54 percent of banking executives say the skills gap will shape workplace strategy, just 3 percent plan to boost investment in re-skilling in the next three years. A majority of the growth in the older workforce comes from educated seniors, but the Economic Policy Research determined unstable or low-wage jobs comprise 50 percent of growth for older employees. Allen understands that older men and women struggle to earn high salaries, and says AARP is "helping older workers adapt to the fact that it's not going to be a traditional job perhaps that will make you financially secure. Increasingly there's going to be more and more different ways in which you generate income."

A study published in Neuropsychologia found individuals with a rare neurodegenerative brain disorder known as Primary Progressive Aphasia (PPA) exhibited abnormalities in brain function in areas that look structurally normal on magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans, reports Medical Xpress . In examining this, the researchers learned the brain had functional defects in regions that were not yet indicating structural damage on MRI. The team compared brain scans of persons with PPA to healthy controls while both cohorts performed language tasks, and imaged participants' brains at rest. The functional defects correlated with worse performance in the tasks, as individuals with PPA lose their ability to speak or understand language while other aspects of cognition are typically retained. The research suggests spotting the discrepancy between a PPA brain's structural and functional integrity could find application as an early-detection method. University of Arizona Professor Aneta Kielar said these findings show promise because "many drugs designed to treat dementia are proving to be not really affective and that might be because we're detecting the brain damage too late."

A study published in the Journal of Prevention of Alzheimer's Disease details how a machine learning algorithm accurately identified individuals in initial-stage Alzheimer's, reports AI in Healthcare . The algorithm was trained to recognize patterns predictive of Alzheimer's in combinations of drug treatments, doctor visits, diagnostic tests, therapeutic procedures, and verified clinical diagnoses. Participants ranged in age from 50 to 85, and approximately 667,000 had at least one record of Alzheimer's diagnosis or treatment. About 3.7 million lacked Alzheimer's and were categorized as controls. A "gradient boosted tree" algorithm exhibited the best ability, identifying 222,721 subjects in the prodromal Alzheimer's stage with 80 percent accuracy, of whom 76 percent were in the primary care setting. The researchers suggested the second result "could drive major advances in Alzheimer's disease research by enabling more accurate and earlier prodromal Alzheimer's disease diagnosis at the primary care physician level, which would facilitate timely referral to expert sites for in-depth assessment and potential enrolment in clinical trials."

A study published in JAMA Surgery that associated walking leashed dogs with fall-related fractures among older adults continues to gain traction, reports the American Journal of Managed Care . Analysis of data from the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission's National Electronic Injury Surveillance System database cited 32,624 cases of fall-related fractures connected to walking leashed canines from 2004 to 2017. Over that time span, the yearly number of adults 65 years or older admitted to the 100 U.S. emergency departments included in the database rose from 1,671 in 2004 to 4,396 in 2017. "This study highlights that while there are undoubtedly pros to dog walking . . . risks for falls must be factored into lifestyle recommendations in an effort to minimize such injuries," noted the University of Pennsylvania's Kevin Pirruccio.

Humana's 2019 National Senior Games scheduled for next month exemplify the value that organized senior sports can offer, reports the Davis Enterprise . The National Senior Games Association (NSGA) features 54 member games held each year throughout the United States and Canada. Athletes become eligible for the national games in even-numbered years within five-year age divisions. "While people are competing for medals, they are also pursuing their optimum health, which we say is your real personal best," says NSGA Chief Executive Marc T. Riker. "It's a lifelong journey that can begin for anyone, at any skill level, at any age." An NSGA study of highly active seniors found athletes measured an average fitness age 25 years younger than their chronological age. Accident prevention is another potential benefit of sports participation, with the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention naming falls the leading cause of fatal injury and the most common cause of nonfatal trauma-related hospitalizations among seniors. Competitive sports like the Senior Games involves participants mentally and socially, and offers them the goals and motivation they frequently need to stay active.