So you will need to ignore your doctors negative thoughts and nocebo pronouncements.
http://www.medpagetoday.com/Geriatrics/GeneralGeriatrics/36043
Older patients with positive attitudes on aging may be more likely to
fully recover from severe disability compared with those who can't see
the bright side of life, researchers found.
A positive stereotype about aging was associated with a 44% greater
likelihood of recovery from severe disability versus negative
stereotypes (95% CI 1.01 to 2.06, P=0.04), according to Becca Levy, PhD, from the Yale School of Public Health, and colleagues.
Holding positive stereotypes in older age was also significantly
associated with a slower rate of decline in activities of daily living (P=0.001), they wrote in a research letter in the Journal of the American Medical Association online.
"Further research is needed to determine whether interventions to
promote positive age stereotypes could extend independent living in
later life," the authors noted.
The researchers sampled patients through the Precipitating Events
Project study and included 598 mostly female patients (63.3%), with an
average age of 79, who belonged to a Connecticut health plan. All
participants lived in a community, were nondisabled, and experienced at
least 1 month of disability from active daily life during the follow-up
period.
The participants were interviewed monthly for up to 129 months and
filled out home-based assessments every 18 months over 10 years.
The researchers established age stereotypes by asking participants
for five terms or phrases they associated with older individuals and
coding those descriptors on a five-point scale, with 1 being most
negative (such as decrepit) and 5 being most positive (such as spry).
The participants scored a mean 2.12 on this scale.
Participants' severity of disability was based on the number of
activities of daily living compromised by disability, including bathing,
dressing, transferring, and walking. Three or four compromised
activities were considered severely disabled; mild to severe disability
required assistance with one to two activities, and mild to no
disability required no assistance with activities of daily life.
The researchers grouped patients on whether they held positive or
negative age stereotypes and compared rates of recovery from severe or
mild injury to no or mild disability. Patients between groups were
well-matched for age, sex, nonwhite ethnicity, frailty, education,
chronic conditions, mental status, depression, and whether or not they
lived alone. The nature of the disabling events was not described.
Patients were significantly more likely to recover from any state of
injury to either no or mild disability if they fit positive age
stereotypes, including from severe disability to no disability, severe
disability to mild disability (HR 1.23, 95% CI 1.03 to 1.46, P=0.02), and mild disability to no disability (HR 1.15, 95% CI 1.02 to 1.29, P=0.02).
The researchers also noted that the positive age-stereotyped patients
"showed an advantage in the absolute risk increase percentages" in
likelihood of recovery, in addition to "a significantly slower rate of
[activities of daily life] decline."
Study limitations included recruitment from a single community and an undersampling of black patients.
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