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When today’s boomers, not to mention today’s pre-boomers (the new-chic word for geezer) were young, stress had not been invented. Oh, moms got frazzled with everything, dads (and occasionally moms too) came home bushed after a long hard day at the office, office buddies groused about too much work for too little pay – but nobody had figured out that Stress was messing with our lives.

Now we know.

Over on the PositScience site – this is a company that follows such things – Karen Merzenich reports on a Wired magazine article by Jonah Lehrer; it’s not online yet, but parts have been on Lehrer’s own blog. Lehrer has found, in talking with primatologist Robert Sapolsky, that stress is bad for one’s health even if one happens to be a baboon

Throughout decades of research studying baboon populations in Africa, Saposkly noticed that low social position created stress and poorer health in some of the baboons. Studies in humans have shown much the same thing. Specifically, things like having a mean boss or not having any control over your work contribute to a sustained stress response in your brain which negatively affects health and longevity. To paraphrase, Lehrer essentially says that stress doesn’t make you sick- but if you are sick, it will make it worse.

This news comes not long after an article in Psychology Today, by Howard Fillit M.D., about stress and its long-terms effects:

Over the course of a lifetime, the effects of chronic stress can accumulate and become a risk factor for cognitive decline and Alzheimer’s disease. Several studies have shown that stress, and particularly one’s individual way of reacting to stress (the propensity to become “dis-stressed” often found in neurotic people for example), increases the risk for Alzheimer’s disease.

For boomers, pre-boomers, elders and geezers, if stress has been accumulating all these years, it’s probably a good time to change. Perhaps, just chill out. Chilling out is something else that wasn’t invented until after stress was… but it is a handy response for these days.

Happy August from Boomers and Beyond.

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Retirement village? Assisted living? Co-housing? Age-restricted or aging-in-place communities? Inter-generational cooperative? This space has explored many of the growing varieties of housing choices for boomers and elders when the time comes to downsize, rightsize, clear out or economize. Here’s a new one that’s making the news: think global.

Even with (and sometimes because of) today’s grim economy, increasing numbers of Americans are choosing senior housing overseas. Some are returning to former homes in countries with lower costs or better health care, some are finding bargain housing in inexpensive areas where they have friends or a support community.

But many are just making housing in another country life’s last great adventure.

According to Boomers Abroad, an ambitious online community/social network, the number of Americans and Canadians living abroad, already about 7 million, is expected to double and then some within the next 10 years — and you’re invited to join them. The site links to the top five locales listed in the just-released September/October issue of  AARP The Magazine the best of what Mexico, France, Panama, Portugal and Italy have to offer—”castles, palm trees, rain forests, grilled lobster—in their unique and unparalleled retirement experiences. ”

A new study by researchers from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM), Cambridge University and the Karolinska Institute in Sweden has found that even light or moderate intensity physical activity, such as walking or cycling, can substantially reduced the risk of early death.

The study, published in the International Journal of Epidemiology, combined the results from the largest studies around the world on the health impact of light and moderate intensity physical activity. It showed that the largest health benefits from light or moderate activity (such as walking and cycling) were in people who do hardly any physical activity at all. Although more activity is better — the benefits of even a small amount of physical activity are very large in the least physically active.

The good news from this study is that you don’t have to be an exercise freak to benefit from physical activity. Just achieving the recommended levels of physical activity (equivalent to 30 minutes daily of moderate intensity activity on 5 days a week) reduces the risk of death by 19% [95%confidence interval 15% to 24%], while 7 hours per week of moderate activity (compared with no activity) reduces the risk of death by 24% (95% CI 19% to 29%).

(Of course, if you get off the raft and jog around the lake, the benefits rise. Who knows, there could be a further reduction in the risk of death, as long as you aren’t jogging in traffic. Over on his Coloradoan blog, senior runner Jon Sinclair points out that runners of a certain age — Sinclair introduced this writer to the “pre-boomer” designation — have been at it long enough to have proved this point: “Everyone stand up. All of you that began running after 1976 can sit down. Those that still are standing can smirk proudly at those sitting. I’m sure there aren’t many of you standing. For us ‘pre-boomers,’ or pbers, the current state of running is amazing and we should all feel happy about it.”)

But the best news of all, especially for those drawn to summertime laziness, is just in from the SportsGeezer. It is the suggestion that if you invite a bunch of friends to join you on the raft, possibly planning for cocktails and dinner later, you might do just as well skipping the walk/jog altogether:

More powerful than exercise, better than giving up smoking, extensive social networks have been shown to increase longevity by 50 percent. The Scientific American reports on research conducted at Brigham Young University that reviewed the results from 148 studies—which included a total of 308,849 participants—going back to the early 20th century. Most studies assessed survival in contrast to mortality from all causes. Sciam reports that the analysis also assessed what kind of studies best predict a person’s survival. Questionnaires that had asked participants at least a few in-depth questions about various social connections (such as, “To what extent are you participating or involved in your social network?” or “To what extent can you count on other people?”) were more effective at pinpointing a person’s overall risk of mortality from all causes than those that simply determined if a person was single or married or lived with at least one other person. The researchers found that when the questions delved deeper, complex social networks increased survival rates by 91 percent.

Prospects for a pleasant summer and a long life just went up.

Frieden, who also serves as Administrator of the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry, is in a position to understand all this. A physician with training in internal medicine, infectious diseases, public health and epidemiology, he has spent the past several decades combating disease and advocating for preventive measures across the U.S. and around the world. He took over as head of CDC in June, 2009.

Speaking to an audience of health professionals and community members at San Francisco’s Commonwealth Club recently, Frieden launched his remarks with a story of treating one patient, a few years ago, who had multi-drug resistant tuberculosis (TB is on the rise these days.) Cost of treatment? Over $100,000. Cost of prevention, had this one man been vaccinated? $10.

High on the list of largely preventable diseases, Frieden said, is cardiovascular disease. Simple measures like quitting smoking, cutting down on (or eliminating) trans fats and losing weight would lead to huge reductions in expenditures on treatment of cardiovascular disease, not to mention longer, healthier lives. He also cited the $200 billion cost of tobacco-related disease, which currently claims some 1200 lives per day.

Other preventable health care costs come from teen pregnancy and motor vehicle accidents, Frieden said, citing the dollars that are saved when these don’t happen. But he came down hardest on obesity. “It is epidemic in the U.S.,” he said. “And in the next 30 years obesity is expected to double in adults and triple among children.”

One audience question (OK, it was submitted by this writer/agitator) went unanswered in the Q&A session following the talk: How can the exorbitant costs invested in often-futile end-of-life treatment be reduced? But that question may have been buried in the substantial pile of other questions posed in relation to the above, and other issues such as:

Can CDC spread some money around to states and local governments for health care? “In a word, no.” And what about the catastrophic Deepwater Horizon oil spill? Its effects will be with us for a long time, Frieden said, but CDC’s primary concern right now is with health and safety of workers and others on the scene. CDC is involved with a number of other agencies addressing the human and environmental impacts of the disaster.

The event was introduced by California HealthCare Foundation Director of the Chronic Disease Care Program Sophia Chang, and moderated by University of California San Francisco Chancellor Emeritus and Global Health Institute Director Haile Debas.

On the good news side — which was a slim side of the room, no pun intended — Frieden cited progress in efforts to promote biking and walking as an alternative to the automobile (currently costing $4 million in emergency room visits and $200 billion overall annual costs; “$12 billion could be saved by seat belts”) and in HIV prevention (treatment for one person: $400,000; cost of a condom, five cents.)

This reporter stood briefly at the back of the near-capacity crowd before the talk started and counted 24 audience members who would qualify as obese. It’s easy to feel righteous when you’ve never had a major weight problem and you got to the event on foot and on Muni bus. It’s hard to feel unsympathetic when you can’t seem to lose those 3 or 4 pounds you could really do without, when you smell the french fries while passing every fast food joint on Market Street and you know how many people don’t have access to good public transportation.

Public health is, indeed a public problem. Dr. Frieden has his work cut out for him.

As it turns out, diagnosing the earliest stage of breast cancer can be surprisingly difficult, prone to both outright error and case-by-case disagreement over whether a cluster of cells is benign or malignant, according to an examination of breast cancer cases by The New York Times.

Advances in mammography and other imaging technology over the past 30 years have meant that pathologists must render opinions on ever smaller breast lesions, some the size of a few grains of salt. Discerning the difference between some benign lesions and early stage breast cancer is a particularly challenging area of pathology, according to medical records and interviews with doctors and patients.

Diagnosing D.C.I.S. “is a 30-year history of confusion, differences of opinion and under- and overtreatment,” said Dr. Shahla Masood, the head of pathology at the University of Florida College of Medicine in Jacksonville. “There are studies that show that diagnosing these borderline breast lesions occasionally comes down to the flip of a coin.”

Much of the current finger-pointing is toward pathologists, where their money comes from, whether they are ‘certified’ or not and in general, how good a job they do.

In 2006, Susan G. Komen for the Cure, an influential breast cancer survivors’ organization, released a startling study. It estimated that in 90,000 cases, women who receive a diagnosis of D.C.I.S. or invasive breast cancer either did not have the disease or their pathologist made another error that resulted in incorrect treatment.

After the Komen report, the College of American Pathologists announced several steps to improve breast cancer diagnosis, including the certification program for pathologists.

For the medical community, the Komen findings were not surprising, since the risk of misdiagnosis had been widely written about in medical literature. One study in 2002, by doctors at Northwestern University Medical Center, reviewed the pathology in 340 breast cancer cases and found that 7.8 percent of them had errors serious enough to change plans for surgery.

This space has argued occasionally for reconsideration of yearly mammograms and for longer, stronger consideration of other options before a mastectomy is performed. Especially in the case of older women.

Would I insist on further studies or opt for less radical treatment if I were diagnosed with breast cancer today? Probably. Can I undo the mastectomy I had at 72? Not exactly. Second-guessing is beside the point for someone who is healthy and fit, but asking questions won’t ever hurt.

Earliest Steps to Find Breast Cancer Are Prone to Error – NYTimes.com.

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A glimmer of good news from the endless bad-news war in Afghanistan: the people doing the fighting are in touch with someone who was winning, a long time before they started fighting.

In the frantic last hours of Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal’s command in Afghanistan, when the world wondered what was racing through the general’s mind, he reached out to an unlikely corner of his life: the author of the book “Three Cups of Tea,” Greg Mortenson.

“Will move through this and if I’m not involved in the years ahead, will take tremendous comfort in knowing people like you are helping Afghans build a future,” General McChrystal wrote to Mr. Mortenson in an e-mail message, as he traveled from Kabul to Washington. The note landed in Mr. Mortenson’s inbox shortly after 1 a.m. Eastern time on June 23. Nine hours later, the general walked into the Oval Office to be fired by President Obama.

Mortenson, of course, hasn’t been winning any battles. What he has been winning are the trust, and occasionally the hearts, of Pakistani tribal leaders in a long-running effort to educate their daughters.

The story of this school-building crusade, which came about as a thank-you gesture after Mortenson received help during a mountaineering mishap, is told in Three Cups of Tea. The story of the book — it went nowhere when published with a warrior subtitle, then caught on like wildfire when Mortenson won a mini-battle to bring it out as his originally intended plea for peace — is told in the talks he has been making around the country for several years.

To hear Mortenson talk, as this writer has happily done several times, is to become a believer in hope. Most of us have been coming home saying, “Gee, could we spend a few billions less on platoons and give a few billions to Greg Mortenson’s schools instead?” Mortenson, a giant of a man who clearly has no personal agenda, is not a motivational speaker. But his tale is compelling.

The title of that first book comes from his discovery, early on, that the first step in building anything — school, relationship, whatever — is to sit down over three cups of tea. Hundreds of cups of tea and a few near-death episodes later, he has quietly managed to forge relationships with isolated tribes and build schools for girls who will grow up — perhaps — to think there’s something good about America. Some schools have been destroyed (and occasionally rebuilt), some relationships have gone sour, but the idea that something good can be developed between the U.S. and that wild land without bombs and guns — or despite guns and bombs — is heart-warming. And more than a little surprising.

Mr. Mortenson, 52, thinks there is no military solution in Afghanistan — he says the education of girls is the real long-term fix — so he has been startled by the Defense Department’s embrace.

“I never, ever expected it,” Mr. Mortenson, a former Army medic, said in a telephone interview last week from Florida, where he had paused between military briefings, book talks for a sequel, “Stones into Schools,” and fund-raising appearances for his institute. (The Central Asia Institute, a nonprofit foundation dedicated to community-based education, primarily for girls, in Pakistan and Afghanistan.)

But thanks to a few military wives, who read Three Cups of Tea and then insisted their husbands read it too, a connection was made between the warriors and the peacemaker. It is an unlikely, and in many ways perilous, partnership, but if you’ve read the book or heard the talk you probably feel a glimmer of optimism.

The military’s Mortenson-method efforts  in Afghanistan thus far are outlined in Elisabeth Bumiller’s July 18 New York Times report. His own job will now involve convincing the elders that he hasn’t become a tool of the military. It’s a strange world out there. But it seems somehow more hopeful.

Unlikely Tutor Giving Military Afghan Advice – NYTimes.com.

Rather than burden their children with the daunting task of caring for them as they age, some baby boomers may be considering an extreme form of “relief.” Suicide.

Psychiatrist Mark Goulston says he’s been approached by some middle-aged patients who say they’d rather “take a bottle of pills” than inconvenience their children.

Dr. Goulston blames the problem on the impatient nature of “millennials” – the offspring of baby boomers – a trait he says was passed down from the boomers themselves.

Adding to their angst is their own experience of taking care of elderly parents, which sometimes leads to feelings of resentment. Baby boomers don’t want their own children to grow to resent and begrudge them when they get old and feeble.

There’s a video exchange between Goulston and CNN’s Don Lemon that’s worth watching, but won’t lift your spirits much.

Add to this don’t-be-a-burden dilemma — and it IS a dilemma that crosses the mind of everyone over 60 and most folks who have a parent over 60 — the bizarre situation of estate taxes right now and the whole business of dying gets seriously complicated. It was okay last year, when you knew estate taxes were magically going to disappear on January 1, 2010, so the focus was on staying alive until then.

There was after-dark violence in Oakland, contained within a fairly small area, following the involuntary manslaughter verdict of transit officer Johannes Mehserle in the death of Oscar Grant, reported on TV news across the country. Oakland takes a lot of guff. There were rallies in support of Mehserle, and gatherings in remembrance of Grant, and worries because many wanted a murder conviction. Following the verdict, a crowd estimated at fewer than 1,000 gathered downtown for a peaceful demonstration of their dissatisfaction with the verdict. A small group of about 100, after the sun went down, turned to vandalism and looting. There were 78 arrests; three-quarters of those arrested were not from Oakland. It’s a sadly familiar story, especially in the way it was reported; what was reported was far from the whole story.

Interestingly, right in the middle of the troubled block is the headquarters of an organization called Not In Our Town (NIOT). “We thought it was important to set the record straight,” the NIOT folks said in an e-mail today, “by filming the encouraging community response taking place right outside our door. Here are the young people of Oakland expressing their love of this city, and their commitment to keeping the peace, no matter their reaction to the verdict.”

NIOT is a national movement that “encourages and connects people who are responding to hate and building more inclusive communities.” On their home page is a U.S. map featuring recent hate incidents (red dots) and recent anti-hate action (green dots.) The green dots outnumber the red dots, which is a heartening development to recognize, although the red dots tend to get better press.

This space is a certified member of NIOT. This space is regularly fingered as a Pollyanna. But the active (as opposed to the certified, who are often wimps) NIOT people are not Pollyannas, but courageous and simultaneously gentle souls. Check them out. You may want a NIOT in your town.

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Would soccer catch on in the U.S if our TV screens were bigger? Maybe so, but I still doubt it. Twenty-two — until you start tossing them out for misbehavior  — guys kicking a tiny ball up and down a field at warp speed without even the excitement of racking up a goal in regulation so you can stop and catch your breath, or a commercial break so you can go to the bathroom, I’m just not sure soccer will ever make it in America. Of course, your TV screen is probably bigger than ours, which is OK. On the giant screens at bars and coffee shops all along San Francisco’s Fillmore Street Sunday there was an awful lot of hoopla. There may have been some business for the restaurant owners, but it looked like a great deal more hooping and hollering than drinking.

It is safe to say that this space has been into soccer longer than any other T/S space. Dating, actually, from the day that #1 son came home from hanging out at some local playground circa 1968, and we said, “You’ve been doing what? A round, black-&-white ball you just kick? Soccer moms had not yet been invented, but this one was, at that moment. Three kids, a combined total of about 36 years at a minimum of 2 or 3 games per week; you do the math. The in-house soccer dad coached so many of them that he and his co-coach had to coach the local high school coach, who had never heard of soccer until then either. But our scruffy, inner city team beat the hoity-toity suburban high school for the state title in 1970-something (it’s all a blur) so it was certainly worth it.

Pro soccer, though, that’s another whole deal. By now every kid in the U.S. has kicked around a soccer ball, half of them are addicts, and still they grow up to be non-fans. Go figure. I think it boils down to the screen size, the warp speed and the lack of bathroom commercial time.

And it’s too bad. The primary emotion I recall from about a century-worth of soccer-game watching was empathy: everybody felt sorry for the goalie’s mom. Didn’t matter if your team scored the goal, you still felt sorry for the goalie’s mom.

The world needs a little more empathy. Meanwhile this space has to quit typing and send condolences to our good friends in Amsterdam.

San Francisco Chronicle writer Bob Egelko summed up the latest on one stage:

The federal judge overseeing a challenge to the “don’t ask, don’t tell” law, scheduled for trial in Southern California next week, has ruled in favor of a gay rights group on a crucial issue – how much evidence the government needs to justify the ban on openly homosexual members of the armed forces.

Obama administration lawyers have argued that courts must let “don’t ask, don’t tell” stand if they find that Congress could have reasonably concluded that excluding gays and lesbians would make the military more effective – the standard most favorable to supporters of the 1993 law.

But U.S. District Judge Virginia Phillips of Riverside, in her final pretrial ruling, said Wednesday that higher court rulings in recent years have raised the bar for the government to justify laws that single out gays and lesbians for harsher treatment. Because “don’t ask, don’t tell” intrudes on “personal and private lives” and “implicates fundamental rights,” Phillips wrote, the Justice Department must show that the ban serves an important public purpose that the military could not achieve some other way.

That principle comes from the 2003 Supreme Court ruling overturning state laws against private homosexual conduct, and from a 2008 ruling by the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco allowing a lesbian officer to challenge her discharge from the Air Force, Phillips said.

Her ruling opens the door for plaintiffs in the case to put gay and lesbian former service members on the witness stand to testify about how being thrown out of the military because of “don’t ask, don’t tell” damaged them. The federal law requires that gays and lesbians who acknowledge their sexual orientation be discharged from the military. Superior officers are barred from asking service members about their orientation.

The plaintiffs, the Log Cabin Republicans gay organization, plan to present researchers who contend the policy harms the military by promoting concealment and divisiveness while excluding qualified personnel. (It is, of course, the Republicans who are threatening a Senate filibuster of a military appropriations bill that includes a repeal measure…)

The Obama administration tried to bar the testimony, arguing that it was irrelevant, and urged Phillips to postpone the trial while Congress considers the president’s proposal to repeal “don’t ask, don’t tell.” President Obama has called the law discriminatory but says he must defend it as long as it is on the books.

On the marriage front, which currently has seen some states legalizing same-sex unions, some banning them and in California a suit to overturn the voter-approved ban, more state/federal convolutions are underway. Associated Press legal affairs writer Denise Lavoie Friday summarized what’s been going on in Massachusetts:

A key part of a law denying married gay couples federal benefits has been thrown out the window in Massachusetts, the first state to legalize gay marriage. The ball now lies in the White House’s court, which must carefully calculate the next move by an administration that has faced accusations it has not vigorously defended the law of the land.

President Barack Obama has said repeatedly that he would like to see the federal Defense of Marriage Act, known as DOMA, repealed. But the Justice Department has defended the constitutionality of the law, which it is required to do.

The administration was silent Friday on whether it would appeal rulings by U.S. District Judge Joseph Tauro. Spokespeople for the White House and the Justice Department said officials are still reviewing the rulings.

DOMA defines marriage as between a man and a woman, prevents the federal government from recognizing gay marriages and allows states to deny recognition of same-sex unions performed elsewhere. Since the law passed in 1996, many states have instituted their own bans on gay marriage, and a handful have allowed the practice.

And over at the annual General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church USA, meeting in Minneapolis

…delegates again approved ordaining openly gay or lesbian clergy. The measure now goes to the presbyteries, or local jurisdictions, where previous General Assembly resolutions to ordain gays and lesbians have been rejected. The General Assembly also debated but did not pass a resolution that would have changed the definition of marriage from a union between a man and a woman to a union of two people.

This Presbyterian writer can tell you that getting individual presbyteries — that’s the regional groups — to approve what the General Assembly delegates just approved is no simple matter. There are plenty of Christians, not to mention less than tolerant folks of every creed and color, down the rabbit hole.

‘Don’t ask, don’t tell’ foes win legal victory.