Please pay attention to the conclusion of this article.
"... the study results don't mean everyone needs to delay retirement. 'It's more staying cognitively active,
staying socially active, continue to be engaged in whatever it is that's enjoyable to you' that's important."

What is more important is that one prepares his (or her) retirement in a proper manner.
Here, the key word is "Preparation for retirement."
Properly prepared retirement brings more mental and physical works, more social activities,
and much more busier and rewarding life.

When I retired, people around me told me that I would die within two years (by average statistics).
Yes, for sure, the former surgeon had died very quickly after his retirement.
But the new "Me" was born and flourishing well in his new life.
A lot of people only focus on dying but do not realize the rebirth of a new life.

I think the worst thing is "forced retirement" by a person who is not prepared for it.
This kind of people probably will die soon or develope dementia much more quickly.

Dementia Rate Is Found to Drop Sharply, as Forecast

By GINA KOLATA
A new study has found that dementia rates among people 65 and older in England and Wales have plummeted by 25 percent over the past two decades, to 6.2 percent from 8.3 percent, a trend that researchers say is probably occurring across developed countries and that could have major social and economic implications for families and societies.
Another recent study, conducted in Denmark, found that people in their 90s who were given a standard test of mental ability in 2010 scored substantially better than people who had reached their 90s a decade earlier. Nearly one-quarter of those assessed in 2010 scored at the highest level, a rate twice that of those tested in 1998. The percentage of subjects severely impaired fell to 17 percent from 22 percent.
The British study, published on Tuesday in The Lancet, and the Danish one, which was released last week, also in The Lancet, soften alarms sounded by advocacy groups and some public health officials who have forecast a rapid rise in the number of people with dementia, as well as in the costs of caring for them. The projections assumed the odds of getting dementia would be unchanged.
Yet experts on aging said the studies also confirmed something they had suspected but had had difficulty proving: that dementia rates would fall and mental acuity improve as the population grew healthier and better educated. The incidence of dementia is lower among those better educated, as well as among those who control their blood pressure and cholesterol, possibly because some dementia is caused by ministrokes and other vascular damage. So as populations controlled cardiovascular risk factors better and had more years of schooling, it made sense that the risk of dementia might decrease. A half-dozen previous studies had hinted that the rate was falling, but they had flaws that led some to doubt the conclusions.
Researchers said the two new studies were the strongest, most credible evidence yet that their hunch had been right. Dallas Anderson, an expert on the epidemiology of dementia at the National Institute on Aging, the principal financer of dementia research in the United States, said the new studies were “rigorous and are strong evidence.” He added that he expected that the same trends were occurring in the United States but that studies were necessary to confirm them.
“It’s terrific news,” said Dr. P. Murali Doraiswamy, an Alzheimer’s researcher at Duke University, who was not involved in the new studies. It means, he said, that the common assumption that every successive generation will have the same risk for dementia does not hold true.
The new studies offer hope amid a cascade of bad news about Alzheimer’s disease and dementia. Major clinical trials of drugs to treat Alzheimer’s have failed. And a recent analysis by the RAND Corporation — based on an assumption that dementia rates would remain steady — concluded that the number of people with dementia would double in the next 30 years as the baby boom generation aged, as would the costs of caring for them. But its lead author, Michael D. Hurd, a principal senior researcher at RAND, said in an interview that his projections of future cases and costs could be off if the falling dementia rates found in Britain held true in the United States.
Dr. Marcel Olde Rikkert of Radboud University Nijmegen Medical Center in the Netherlands, who wrote an editorial to accompany the Danish study, said estimates of the risk of dementia in older people “urgently need a reset.”
But Maria Carrillo, vice president of medical and scientific relations at the Alzheimer’s Association, an advocacy group, was not convinced that the trends were real or that they held for the United States.
The studies assessed dementia, which includes Alzheimer’s disease but also other conditions that can make mental functioning deteriorate. Richard Suzman, the director of the division of behavioral and social research at the National Institute on Aging, said it was not possible to know from the new studies whether Alzheimer’s was becoming more or less prevalent.
The British researchers, led by Dr. Carol Brayne of the Cambridge Institute of Public Health, took advantage of a large study that tested 7,635 randomly selected people, ages 65 and older, for dementia between 1984 and 1994. The subjects lived in Cambridgeshire, Newcastle and Nottingham. Then, between 2008 and 2011, the researchers assessed a similar randomly selected group living in the same areas.
“We had the same population, the same geographic area, the same methods,” Dr. Brayne said. “That was one of the appeals.”
But Dr. Carrillo questioned the data because many subjects had declined to be assessed: the researchers assessed 80 percent of the group it approached in the first round and 56 percent of those approached in the second. Her concern is reasonable, Dr. Brayne said, but the researchers addressed it by analyzing the data to see if the refusals might have skewed the results. They did not.
In the Danish study, Dr. Kaare Christensen of the University of Southern Denmark in Odense and his colleagues compared the physical health and mental functioning of two groups of elderly Danish people. The first consisted of 2,262 people born in 1905 who were assessed at age 93. The second was composed of 1,584 people born in 1915 and assessed at age 95. In addition to examining the subjects for physical strength and robustness, the investigators gave them a standard dementia screening test, the mini-mental exam and a series of cognitive tests.
The investigators asked how many subjects scored high, had scores indicating dementia and were in between. The entire curve was shifted upward among the people born in 1915, they discovered.
Dr. Anderson, of the National Institute on Aging, said the news was good.
“With these two studies, we are beginning to see that more and more of us will have a chance to reach old age cognitively intact, postponing dementia or avoiding it altogether,” he said. “That is a happy prospect.”


Correction: July 16, 2013

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction: An earlier version of this article misspelled the name of the medical center where Dr. Marcel Olde Rikkert works. It is the Radboud University Nijmegen Medical Center in the Netherlands, not Nigmegen.
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PUBLISHED JULY 16, 2013


http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/17/health/study-finds-dip-in-dementia-rates.html

How Long Will You Work When You Should Be Retired?

By Ales Hemsky | Investopedia

You may have heard the popular legend about Eskimo tribes sending the elderly off to die at sea. As the stories go, when grandpa and grandma could no longer hunt or earn their keep, the younger folks would put them on an iceberg and ship them off. Fewer mouths to feed gave the younger generations a better chance at survival. I shudder at the thought.
In the farming communities where my grandparents lived, the older folks contributed whatever they could. As a boy, I spent many an afternoon shucking lima beans and husking corn with my 90-year-old great-grandmother. The garden and livestock provided enough for her children and grandchildren to support her in her old age. Fortunately for her, the Midwestern mentality was a little less harsh than that of the Eskimos.
Retirement is not a foregone conclusion for everyone, which begs the question: What is retirement?
A Working Retirement Is the New Status Quo
Does retirement mean you don't work? Not necessarily. One of my high school friends joined the navy at age 18 and retired with a nice benefits package at age 38. After that, he worked as a county sheriff for a couple of decades and received full retirement pay from that job as well. Many of my retired peers are still working; they just do something different than they did during their first careers. That includes your humble scribe. When I retired, I had no idea that, less than a decade later, I would spend the bulk of my free time typing away in front of a computer, sharing my experiences and investment guidance with people around the world.
The happiest retirees I know retired to do something they looked forward to and wanted more time for. I was not one of them. I loved what I did during my old career, but the hassles of international travel like racing to catch planes and living in hotel rooms were wearing me out. When I finally threw in the towel, I didn't care if I ever got on another plane again. My wife Jo and I spent a few years driving around the country in a motorhome, and then eventually we bought another home (not on wheels) and settled down.
At that point, I had retired from something I was beginning to hate, but I still needed to find something I enjoyed doing every day. Those folks who have a second career lined up when they retire seem to make the transition more easily. A second career may or may not bring in much income, but that is often secondary to enjoying the job. Jo and I have a friend who retired and became an artist. She is thrilled when one of her paintings sells, but even more thrilled that someone enjoyed her art enough to hang it in their home.
I feel the same way about Money Forever. It comes with financial rewards, but the real thrill comes from the nice emails I receive from readers around the globe. Knowing that I've helped folks who are in the same boat I am in makes my day. If you can do work you enjoy, something that's both emotionally and financially rewarding, why would you ever quit?
Some People Will Never Retire
I of course realize that many older folks work for different reasons. Unfortunately, many have to work to put food on the table. In my first career, I often used Abraham Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs as a teaching tool. Maslow categorized humans' physiological needs – food, clothing, shelter, etc. – as the first level of his hierarchy. Our caveman ancestors woke up hungry every morning and had to go hunt and gather food. When you are worried about feeding your family and your own stomach is growling, you can't spend a lot of time sharing your artwork on the walls of your cave.
Squirrels store nuts to survive through the winter, but over time man has become the best animal at storing nuts, so to speak. We went from hunting and gathering food as we traveled from place to place, to clearing and irrigating land for agriculture, to curing food with salt to preserve it, and then on to canning and now freezing foods. No matter the method, man's first goal has always been to survive today, tomorrow, and hopefully many tomorrows after that.
Most folks no longer store food in their farm cellars like my grandparents did. Instead, they save money and store it in banks and brokerage accounts. The beauty of money is that, unlike a can of peaches, it can grow while in storage. If we store enough money, it can provide adequate income to free up our time for other pursuits.
What about folks who can't retire, people who have to work until the grim reaper comes knocking? Maybe they worked low-paying jobs, were poor savers or investors, had bad luck, or as is more likely the case these days, were big-time spenders. Regardless of how it happened, these folks arrived at their autumn years and their storage bins were empty. No one wants to end up in that boat. Everyone wants enough money saved to retire at some point. Even people who want to keep working want work to be a choice, not a prerequisite for survival.
Are We in a Retirement Crisis?
The phrase "retirement crisis" is certainly tossed around in the news quite a bit, but what is the crisis?
To begin with, many seniors have not saved enough money to support themselves in their old age. These folks will either continue to work or end up depending on their children and/or public assistance. And old age is lasting a lot longer than it used to as medical advances continue to increase life expectancy. That means folks who saved enough for just twenty years or so of retirement are finding themselves in a pickle as their life continues on even as their savings dwindles; a long life is a blessing, but what happens when 95-year-olds can't pay their bills?
For those of us with a decent nest egg, our retirement crisis is a bit different. It involves growing our savings in a low-yield environment while protecting it from risky investments, predatory fees, and confiscatory taxes. These steps can keep us from becoming a burden on our families or anyone else, but they take work and a commitment to learning.
The truth is, our government has targeted seniors and savers. Congress wants to redistribute our nest eggs to appease their constituents (and donors); that’s one of the major reasons the vast majority of incumbents continue to be re-elected and only a very few number of districts are even in play. It's a fact of life that's not likely to change, and we need to work around it.
My Kind of Retirement
For me, retirement means having enough money to choose how I spend my time. It could mean something different for you. Just like our readers, my wife Jo and I worked hard, saved, and made smart investments to get here. I'm sure most of you feel the same way.
Retirement means having enough money to really enjoy the things we want to do right up until the end. The retirement we envision involves being totally independent, not depending on the government or our family. In order to accomplish that goal, we must tend our garden and manage our nest egg wisely.
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Depending on your own circumstances, retirement may or may not mean you stop working entirely. That's your decision. But it should not mean having to work a job you no longer like, or taking on a minimum-wage job after retiring from your career just to make ends meet. It should mean living life on your terms, and that requires financial independence. From the very beginning our mission is to help you with that.
If you're interested in learning how to become financially independent, whether you're currently retired or a few years away, I'd like to invite you to try Money Forever with a 90-day risk-free trial subscription. In each issue of Money Forever, we share actionable, conservative, income-generating investment ideas to help you create your own path to financial independence – ones you can put in your portfolio today. Plus, you'll get detailed research on subjects important to anyone in or planning for retirement: annuities, reverse mortgages, financial advisors, etc.
To give Money Forever a 90-day, risk-free try, just click here to get started.

Dennis Miller is the author of “Retirement Reboot”, a book chronicling his own journey to save his retirement in a low yield, turbulent investing environment and providing readers with actionable ideas for getting their retirement finances back on track. He works with some of the country’s top investment managers, authors and analysts to tackle the financial challenges faced by today’s retirees. Working with analysts at Casey Research, Dennis created "Miller’s Money Forever," a newsletter that provides retirees, and those soon to be retired, with actionable recommendations on how to prepare and maintain a profitable retirement portfolio. Prior to retiring in 2008 Dennis ran a successful consulting business and authored several books on sales management. He was also a regular contributor to the American Management Association and an active international lecturer for 40 years. Find more of Dennis’ columns and latest special research reports at millersmoney.com or contact him at dennis@millersmoney.

Looking for Early Signs of Dementia? Ask the Patient

By PAM BELLUCK
The man complained of memory problems but seemed perfectly normal. No specialist he visited detected any decline.
“He insisted that things were changing, but he aced all of our tests,” said Rebecca Amariglio, a neuropsychologist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston. But about seven years later, he began showing symptoms of dementia. Dr. Amariglio now believes he had recognized cognitive changes so subtle “he was the only one who could identify it.”
Patients like this have long been “called the worried well,” said Creighton Phelps, acting chief of the dementias of aging branch of the National Institute on Aging. “People would complain, and we didn’t really think it was very valid to take that into account.”
But now, scientists are finding that some people with such complaints may, in fact, be detecting early harbingers of Alzheimer’s. Studies presented Wednesday at an Alzheimer’s Association conference in Boston show that people with some types of cognitive concerns were more likely to have Alzheimer’s pathology in their brains, and to develop dementia later. Research presented by Dr. Amariglio, for example, found that people with more concerns about memory and organizing ability were more likely to have increased levels of amyloid, a key Alzheimer’s-related protein, in their brains.
And, in a significant shift highlighted at the conference, leading Alzheimer’s researchers are identifying a new category: “subjective cognitive decline,” people’s perception of fledgling changes still invisible to others.
“The whole field now is moving to this area, and saying ‘Hey, maybe there is something to this, and maybe we should pay attention to these people,’ ” said Dr. Ronald C. Petersen, chairman of the advisory panel to the federal government’s new National Alzheimer’s Project.
Dr. Petersen, director of the Mayo Clinic’s Alzheimer’s center, said preliminary results of a Mayo study of healthy older adults in Minnesota suggested something similar. “Lo and behold, those who had a concern about their memory in fact had more likelihood” of later developing mild cognitive impairment, an early phase of dementia, he said. He said study participants with memory concerns were 56 percent more likely to be given a diagnosis of such impairment, even when results were adjusted for factors like education, genetic risk and psychiatric issues like anxiety and depression.
“These people are sensing something, and there’s some biological signals that correlate,” Dr. Petersen said. “I think it’s real.”
Experts emphasize that many people with such complaints will not develop dementia. Some memory decline reflects normal aging, they say, and some concerns reflect psychological angst.
And much remains unknown about subjective concerns. In some studies, like Dr. Amariglio’s, highly -educated people noticed changes more readily, but in other studies, less-educated people did. Some studies suggest people who worry more about deficits have more dementia risk, but it is unclear if the worry reflects the changes they sense or if worrying itself increases risk. People with family histories of dementia could be reporting problems simply because they know about the disease and its genetic component. And, while a study presented Wednesday found slight correlations between subjective concerns and the highest-risk genetic mutation, ApoE4, that relationship remains unclear.
Not every memory concern correlated with amyloid buildup, Dr. Amariglio said. People who forget what they wanted in the kitchen or the names of relatively unfamiliar people are probably aging normally. People who forget important details of recent events, get lost in familiar places or lose track of book or television plots may not be, especially if they have more problems than others their age.
Experts also are not yet suggesting doctors regularly screen people for “subjective cognitive decline” because much more research is needed and no effective dementia treatment now exists.
Dr. Richard Caselli, a neurology professor at the Mayo Clinic in Arizona, said that when patients cited cognitive problems, he ruled out “reversible things,” but did not recommend testing for Alzheimer’s because “if we do a scan and say, ‘Hey, we found some amyloid in your brain,’ there’s really nothing you can do.”
But subjective screening has value now for clinical trials, experts say, because it can help pinpoint people at higher risk for dementia to better determine if treatments can delay or prevent Alzheimer’s.
Major studies like the Alzheimer's Disease Neuroimaging Initiative are adding subjective memory complaint categories. So will an important upcoming trial to see if an anti-amyloid drug can prevent dementia in cognitively normal people with amyloid in their brains.
“People have been interested in this subjective concern for a long time, but we didn’t have a way to say is this normal,” said Dr. Reisa Sperling, who runs Brigham and Women’s Alzheimer’s program and is helping lead the coming anti-amyloid study.
Not long ago, most experts considered subjective concerns unmeasurable or related to depression or anxiety. Frank Jessen, a researcher at the German Center for Neurodegenerative Diseases, said his first study on the topic, submitted to journals around 2004, “got rejected everywhere,” but in 2012, the same study with more years of data was accepted by Neurology, a major journal.
In November, a working group of leading experts was formed, headed by Dr. Jessen. The name “subjective cognitive decline” was chosen after some debate, with some experts preferring other terms.
Dr. Jessen said in diseases from arthritis to Parkinson’s, people often feel something is wrong before others notice. In most phases of dementia, family members and friends see deficits, but the disease has usually stolen the person’s ability to recognize them. But at the subjective phase, studies suggest family members may miss problems; the person may feel his mind working harder, but he still functions well.
One of Dr. Caselli’s patients, Roger Siegel, 84, has noticed problems for at least five years, and said he now remembers about 30 percent of what he would like to, and has trouble concentrating. “I take a shower and wonder did I wash that leg,” he said. In books, “many times I forget which character is which.”
Recently, he bought six packages of pie filling instead of one “because I asked somebody where would I find it and the answer was aisle six, so I wrote down six, but by the time I got to the aisle, I picked up six of the thing.”
Neither his wife nor Dr. Caselli perceive these difficulties.
“I know I’m losing my mind,” Mr. Siegel said, “but according to Caselli, I’m fine.”
Dr. Caselli said Mr. Siegel has “been saying he is declining for years,” and was given a diagnosis at another clinic of mild cognitive impairment three years ago “based on his subjective complaints, when he had no evidence of decline and I told him so.”
But recently fine-grained cognitive measures showed he had “slight decline on his tests, and so may possibly be at a very early stage of a very slowly progressive degenerative syndrome,” Dr. Caselli said.
The working group aims to develop standardized subjective cognitive tests so when treatments become available doctors can eventually use them as a “cheap and noninvasive” way to help identify people at greater risk, said Dr. Petersen. “We can’t do M.R.I.s and scanning on everyone,” he said.
Current tests range from an eight-page assessment in Dr. Amariglio’s research to one question included in a broader University of Kentucky study of dementia. But Richard Kryscio, a biostatistician and study leader, said those reporting memory changes since their last visit were 2.8 times as likely to develop mild cognitive impairment or dementia years later, and autopsies of participants who died found more Alzheimer’s plaques and tangles in people with subjective cognitive concerns.
Experts say the goal is a test identifying which subjective concerns are potentially worrisome, since not all are.
Sharon Atkinson-Mallory, 70, of Belmont, Mass., a participant in Dr. Amariglio’s study of people without symptoms, said she had occasional trouble putting names to faces and remembering why she entered a room. But Ms. Atkinson-Mallory, a psychotherapist, maintains a part-time practice, exercises, pursues a genealogy hobby, and considers her issues similar to those of others her age.
Carol Miller, 61, of Rochester, Minn., part of the Mayo Clinic’s study of cognitively healthy adults, seems more concerned. A registered nurse who retired after being laid off a few years ago, she has forgotten cardiovascular and neurological vocabulary that once “I would recall very easily,” she said. “I don’t trust myself as a safe R.N. because I don’t have the knowledge anymore.”
When shopping for blueberry filling for her daughter’s birthday cake, she twice reached the checkout counter having forgotten it. And twice she has left the stove on. “I could’ve burned the house down,” she said. “That was scary, like ‘Wow, what’s the deal there?'”
Still, she said, “so far they tell me I’m normal.”
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PUBLISHED JULY 17, 2013


http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/18/health/looking-for-early-signs-of-dementia.html

These articles except the one by Hemsky are from the International Conference of Alzheimer's Association which is currently
taking place in Boston, and I believe contain some useful informations for our aging alumni and their spouses.