Healthy aging can look different to different people.

Healthy aging is a concept that I did not really think much about before choosing a career path of being a physical therapist and coming to college. Through work and school experience I have developed a greater idea on how I define healthy aging. To me, being healthy means being free of disease, staying active and having a balanced diet. Working in healthcare for two years I have seen greater outcomes from strokes and other medical issues when older adults are active and healthy before their admission to the hospital. Those individuals who are not as active, smoke and have other co-morbid conditions have a harder time through the recovery process and have longer stays in the intensive care unit and the hospital. I think staying active both mentally and physically is the best way to remain healthy while aging. In one of my other classes, we looked at the nun study and basically, the premise of this was that these women stayed active and still taught well into late adulthood and lived to be in their late nineties with no signs of serious medical conditions such as Alzheimer disease. These women donated their brains to science and while some of them had the brain pattern of having Alzheimer’s, they did not have any signs or symptoms of the disease. While declines such as sarcopenia and osteoporosis (loss of muscle mass and bone density) are likely to happen with age, staying active and meeting the moderate activity level recommended by the American College of Sports Medicine can help to slow the degradation of these issues. A ten minute bout of exercise (3x/day) is enough to gain health benefits and even lessen the severity of chronic health conditions such as diabetes and cardiovascular disease. The classes I have taken thus far in college and working as both a physical therapy tech at a hospital and medical assistant at a weightloss clinic has added to my perspective that healthy aging begins and is greatly reliant on being active physically and mentally.