50-year-old muscles just can’t grow big like they used to – the biology of how muscles change with age
Roger Fielding, Senior Scientist Team Lead Nutrition Exercise Physiology and Sarcopenia Team Jean Mayer USDA Human Nutrition Research Center on Aging, Professor of Medicine, Tufts University – February 19, 2023
There is perhaps no better way to see the absolute pinnacle of human athletic abilities than by watching the Olympics. But at the Olympics – and at almost all professional sporting events – you rarely see a competitor over 40 years old and almost never see a single athlete over 50. This is because with every additional year spent on Earth, bodies age and muscles don’t respond to exercise the same as they used to.
I lead a team of scientists who study the health benefits of exercise, strength training and diet in older people. We investigate how older people respond to exercise and try to understand the underlying biological mechanisms that cause muscles to increase in size and strength after resistance or strength training.
Old and young people build muscle in the same way. But as you age, many of the biological processes that turn exercise into muscle become less effective. This makes it harder for older people to build strength but also makes it that much more important for everyone to continue exercising as they age.
The exercise I study is the type that makes you stronger. Strength training includes exercises like pushups and situps, but also weightlifting and resistance training using bands or workout machines.
When you do strength training, over time, exercises that at first felt difficult become easier as your muscles increase in strength and size – a process called hypertrophy. Bigger muscles simply have larger muscle fibers and cells, and this allows you to lift heavier weights. As you keep working out, you can continue to increase the difficulty or weight of the exercises as your muscles get bigger and stronger.
It is easy to see that working out makes muscles bigger, but what is actually happening to the cells as muscles increase in strength and size in response to resistance training?
Any time you move your body, you are doing so by shortening and pulling with your muscles – a process called contraction. This is how muscles spend energy to generate force and produce movement. Every time you contract a muscle – especially when you have to work hard to do the contraction, like when lifting weights – the action causes changes to the levels of various chemicals in your muscles. In addition to the chemical changes, there are also specialized receptors on the surface of muscle cells that detect when you move a muscle, generate force or otherwise alter the biochemical machinery within a muscle.
In a healthy young person, when these chemical and mechanical sensory systems detect muscle movement, they turn on a number of specialized chemical pathways within the muscle. These pathways in turn trigger the production of more proteins that get incorporated into the muscle fibers and cause the muscle to increase in size.
These cellular pathways also turn on genes that code for specific proteins in cells that make up the muscles contracting machinery. This activation of gene expression is a longer-term process, with genes being turned on or off for several hours after a single session of resistance exercise.
The overall effect of these many exercise-induced changes is to cause your muscles to get bigger.
How older muscles change
While the basic biology of all people, young or old, is more or less the same, something is behind the lack of senior citizens in professional sports. So what changes in a person’s muscles as they age?
What my colleagues and I have found in our research is that in young muscle, a little bit of exercise produces a strong signal for the many processes that trigger muscle growth. In older people’s muscles, by comparison, the signal telling muscles to grow is much weaker for a given amount of exercise. These changes begin to occur when a person reaches around 50 years old and become more pronounced as time goes on.
In a recent study, we wanted to see if the changes in signaling were accompanied by any changes in which genes – and how many of them – respond to exercise. Using a technique that allowed us to measure changes in thousands of genes in response to resistance exercise, we found that when younger men exercise, there are changes in the expression of more than 150 genes. When we looked at older men, we found changes in the expression of only 42 genes. This difference in gene expression seems to explain, at least partly, the more visible variation between how young and old people respond to strength training.
Strength training can help maintain overall fitness and allow you to keep doing other things you love as you age. Peathegee Inc via Getty Images
While younger people may get stronger and build bigger muscles much faster than their older counterparts, older people still get incredibly valuable health benefits from exercise, including improved strength, physical function and reduced disability. So the next time you are sweating during a workout session, remember that you are building muscle strength that is vital to maintaining mobility and good health throughout a long life.
This article is republished from The Conversation, a nonprofit news site dedicated to sharing ideas from academic experts.
Rebecca Fuoco, David Rosner and Gerald Markowitz – February 19, 2023
Ms. Fuoco is the director of science communications at the Green Science Policy Institute. Dr. Rosner is a professor of sociomedical sciences and history at Columbia. Dr. Markowitz is a history professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice.
A black plume and flames rise over East Palestine, Ohio, from a controlled burn of chemicals carried by a derailed train.Credit…Gene J. Puskar/Associated Press
Like a scene out of some postapocalyptic movie, Gov. Mike DeWine of Ohio convened a news conference on Feb. 5 to deliver a stark warning. “We are ordering them to leave,” he said of residents of the small rural community of East Palestine, Ohio, and a neighboring part of Pennsylvania. “This is a matter of life and death.” To emphasize the point, he added: “Those in the red area are facing grave danger of death if they are still in that area.”
In this case, the “grave danger of death” was not a zombie fungus or lethal bacteria but chemicals. The red area was an area one mile by two miles surrounding the town, on the Ohio-Pennsylvania border about 40 miles northwest of Pittsburgh.
Two days earlier, it was the site of a fiery derailment of train cars carrying the gas vinyl chloride and other chemicals. Freight trains typically transport more than two million carloads of hazardous materials each year, including many chemicals. Vinyl chloride is particularly dangerous and increasingly common, used primarily to make polyvinyl chloride, better known as PVC, a hard plastic resin used to produce pipes, wire, cable coatings and packaging. We should begin phasing out the use of this chemical.
It was a particular concern in East Palestine after the derailment. Because vinyl chloride is so flammable, it created a risk of an explosion that could launch deadly shrapnel as far as a mile. To avoid such a catastrophe, railroad officials vented the vinyl chloride and burned it off.
But shrapnel wasn’t the only risk. Inhaling vinyl chloride fumes can be deadly. Even people in neighboring towns were at risk. On Feb. 10, seven days after the crash, the Environmental Protection Agency said that chemicals were “known to have been and continue to be” released to the air, surface soil and surface waters.
Residents complained last week of rashes, headaches and a lingering odor. Thousands of dead fish turned up in streams near the crash site.
Vinyl chloride is not just suspected of causing cancer. The International Agency for Research on Cancer considers it a Group 1 carcinogen known to cause liver cancer in highly exposed industrial workers. It has also been associated with brain and lung cancers, lymphoma and leukemia.
We need to stop producing and using vinyl chloride and its most important end product, PVC plastics. Increasingly, major businesses are phasing it out. Many European communities have banned or restricted its use, even as the PVC plastics industry is expanding.
The United States should begin eliminating PVC by categories of use. Legislation has been floated in California to prohibit PVC in food packaging — a ban that could be expanded to other nonessential needs. Though PVC is inexpensive, it is replaceable in most cases. Alternatives include glass, ceramics, linoleum, polyesters and more.
Also, discarded PVC should be labeled a hazardous waste. The designation would put the burden on users for its safe storage, transportation and disposal, creating an incentive to accelerate its elimination. The E.P.A. tentatively rejected such an action in January but is still accepting public comment on the proposal.
You might wonder why such a hazardous chemical, among others, is being transported along American railways and through our communities. It’s because vinyl chloride is one of the most produced petrochemicals in the world. Tens of millions of tons of it are manufactured annually. (It was used as an aerosol propellant in household consumer products like hair spray until it was banned in aerosols by the Consumer Product Safety Commission in 1974.)
Vinyl chloride manufacturers laid the groundwork for the chemical’s proliferation decades ago with cover-ups and disinformation campaigns. Their own research showed that exposure led to deadly cancers in rodents. Numerous studies have found that workers regularly exposed to the chemical during the 1970s developed malignant liver cancers at very high rates. Chemical companies knew early on they were unleashing a dangerous substance into the world.
The extraordinary efforts of the chemical industry to continue selling products it knew were harmful were recounted by two of us in our 2002 book “Deceit and Denial.”
In addition to the manufacturing and transportation risks of vinyl chloride, PVC plastics can release endocrine-disrupting phthalates, used to soften PVC, and cancer-causing dioxins into air and water during much of their life cycle.
Many of the vinyl chloride and PVC production facilities are clustered with other petrochemical facilities along an 85-mile stretch of the Mississippi River in Louisiana between Baton Rouge and New Orleans known as Cancer Alley. People in one town in the area, most of whom are Black, are about 50 times as likely to develop cancer as the average American. They face the constant threat of chemical accidents.
The PVC plastics industry is expanding in other parts of the country. Growing plastics hubs in Ohio, Pennsylvania and West Virginia could become new cancer alleys.
As long as PVC production continues, the risk of vinyl chloride spills will persist. Worse, more workers and communities will be exposed to the ticking time bombs of cancer and other severe health harms.
Millions of debt collections dropped off Americans’ credit reports
Gabriella Cruz – Martinez – Personal finance writer – February 18, 2023
Tens of millions of debt collections disappeared from Americans’ credit reports during the pandemic, a new government watchdog report found, but overdue medical bills remain a big strain on many households nationwide.
The total number of debt collections on credit reports dropped by 33% from 261 million in 2018 to 175 million in 2022, according to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, while the share of consumers with a debt collection on their credit report shrunk by 20%.
Medical debt collections also dropped by 17.9% during that time, but still made up 57% of all collection accounts on credit reports, far more than other types of debt combined — including credit cards, utilities, and rent accounts.
Despite the reduction in collections, the CFPB noted that the results underscore ongoing concerns that current medical billing and collection practices can lack transparency, often hurting the credit scores and financial health of those most vulnerable.
“Our analysis of credit reports provides yet another indicator that, due to a strong labor market and emergency programs during the pandemic, household financial distress reduced over the last two years,” Rohit Chopra, CFPB director said in a statement. “However, false and inaccurate medical debt on credit reports continues to drag on household financial health.”
Signage is seen at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) headquarters in Washington, D.C., (Credit: Andrew Kelly, REUTERS)
Having a debt in collections means your original creditor sent your debt to a third-party agency to collect it. According to the CFPB, common items that can slip into collections include medical debt, student loans, unpaid credit card balances and rent, to name a few.
Once in collections, these debts can stay on your credit report for up to 7 years, Experian noted, potentially harming your chances of gaining access to new credit in the future.
While pandemic-era stimulus benefits may have helped families reduce some of their overall debt, the CFPB noted that the decline in collections was mainly due to some debt collectors underreporting data.
According to the report, debt collectors — particularly those who primarily collect on medical bills — reported 38% fewer collection tradelines from 2018 to 2022. Chopra noted this could be troubling.
(Photo: Getty Creative)
The “decline in collections tradelines does not necessarily reflect a decline in debt collection activity, nor an improvement in families’ abilities to meet their financial obligations,” he said, “but a choice by debt collectors and others to report fewer collections tradelines, while still conducting other collection activities.”
Fortunately, a growing share of Americans may see even more medical debt disappear from their credit history this year, helping to improve their creditworthiness.
In the first half of 2023, Equifax, Experian, and TransUnion will no longer include medical debts under the amount of $500 on credit reports. That followed the credit bureaus’ move last year to remove approximately 70% of medical collection debt tradelines from consumer reports. Additionally, unpaid medical debt would take a year — rather than the current six months — to show up on a person’s credit report, the bureaus said.
About two dozen people eventually filled the “Debt and Collections” courtroom in Poplar Bluff, Missouri. Many of the cases on the docket involved medical debt. (Credit: Michael S. Williamson/The Washington Post via Getty Images)
Those upcoming changes may still be just a drop in the bucket toward reducing medical debt, Chopra said.
“While this will reduce the total number of medical collections tradelines, an estimated half of all consumers with medical collections tradelines will still have them on their credit reports,” Chopra said in the report, “with the larger collection amounts representing a majority of the outstanding dollar amount of medical collections remaining on credit reports.”
The CFPB analysis builds on the Biden-Harris Administration’s aim to strengthen the Affordable Care Act and implement new consumer protections to reduce the burden of medical debt and lower medical costs.
It also follows a string of CFPB reports citing how inaccurate medical debt tradelines could not only unfairly harm consumers’ credit scores, but also create long-term repercussions such as avoidance of medical care, risk of bankruptcy, or difficulty securing employment.
Gabriella is a personal finance reporter at Yahoo Finance.
How Climate Change Is Making Tampons (and Lots of Other Stuff) More Expensive
Coral Davenport – February 18, 2023
Cotton left over after the harvest in Meadow, Texas, Jan. 19, 2023. (Jordan Vonderaar/The New York Times)
When the Agriculture Department finished its calculations last month, the findings were startling: 2022 was a disaster for upland cotton in Texas, the state where the coarse fiber is primarily grown and then sold around the globe in the form of tampons, cloth diapers, gauze pads and other products.
In the biggest loss on record, Texas farmers abandoned 74% of their planted crops — nearly 6 million acres — because of heat and parched soil, hallmarks of a megadrought made worse by climate change.
That crash has helped to push up the price of tampons in the United States 13% over the past year. The price of cloth diapers spiked 21%. Cotton balls climbed 9%, and gauze bandages increased by 8%. All of that was well above the country’s overall inflation rate of 6.5% in 2022, according to data provided by the market research firms NielsonIQ and The NPD Group.
It’s an example of how climate change is reshaping the cost of daily life in ways that consumers might not realize.
West Texas is the main source of upland cotton in the United States, which in turn is the world’s third-biggest producer and largest exporter of the fiber. That means the collapse of the upland cotton crop in West Texas will spread beyond the United States, economists say, onto store shelves around the world.
“Climate change is a secret driver of inflation,” said Nicole Corbett, a vice president at NielsonIQ. “As extreme weather continues to impact crops and production capacity, the cost of necessities will continue to rise.”
Halfway around the world in Pakistan, the world’s sixth-largest producer of upland cotton, severe flooding, made worse by climate change, destroyed half that country’s cotton crop.
There have been other drags on the global cotton supply. In 2021, the United States banned imports of cotton from the Xinjiang region of China, a major cotton-producing area, out of concerns about the use of forced labor.
But experts say that the impact of the warming planet on cotton is expanding across the planet with consequences that may be felt for decades to come.
By 2040, half of the regions around the globe where cotton is grown will face a “high or very high climate risk” from drought, floods and wildfires, according to the nonprofit group Forum for the Future.
Texas cotton offers a peek into the future. Scientists project that heat and drought exacerbated by climate change will continue to shrink yields in the Southwest — further driving up the prices of many essential items. A 2020 study found that heat and drought worsened by climate change have already lowered the production of upland cotton in Arizona and projected that future yields of cotton in the region could drop by 40% between 2036 and 2065.
Cotton is “a bellwether crop,” said Natalie Simpson, an expert in supply chain logistics at the University at Buffalo. “When weather destabilizes it, you see changes almost immediately,” Simpson said. “This is true anywhere it’s grown. And the future supply that everyone depends on is going to look very different from how it does now. The trend is already there.”
Return of the Dust Bowl
For decades, the Southwestern cotton crop has depended on water pumped from the Ogallala Aquifer, which stretches underneath eight western states from Wyoming to Texas.
But the Ogallala is declining, in part because of climate change, according to the 2018 National Climate Assessment, a report issued by 13 federal agencies. “Major portions of the Ogallala Aquifer should now be considered a nonrenewable resource,” it said.
That is the same region that was abandoned by more than 2 million people during the Dust Bowl of the 1930s, caused by severe drought and poor farming practices. John Steinbeck famously chronicled the trauma in his epic “The Grapes of Wrath,” about a family of cotton farmers driven from their Oklahoma home. Lately, the novel has been weighing on the mind of Mark Brusberg, a meteorologist at the Agriculture Department.
“The last time this happened, there was a mass migration of producers from where they couldn’t survive any longer to a place where they were going to give it a shot,” Brusberg said. “But we have to figure out how to keep that from happening again.”
In the years since, the farmland over the Ogallala once again flourished as farmers drew from the aquifer to irrigate their fields. But now, with the rise in heat and drought and the decline of the aquifer, those dust storms are returning, the National Climate Assessment found. Climate change is projected to increase the duration and intensity of drought over much of the Ogallala region in the next 50 years, the report said.
Barry Evans, a fourth-generation cotton farmer near Lubbock, Texas, doesn’t need a scientific report to tell him that. Last spring, he planted 2400 acres of cotton. He harvested 500 acres.
“This is one of the worst years of farming I’ve ever seen,” he said. “We’ve lost a lot of the Ogallala Aquifer, and it’s not coming back.”
When Evans began farming cotton in 1992, he said, he was able to irrigate about 90% of his fields with water from the Ogallala. Now that’s down to 5% and declining, he said. He has been growing cotton in rotation with other crops and using new technologies to maximize the precious little moisture that does arrive from the skies. But he sees farmers around him giving up.
“The decline of the Ogallala has had a strong impact on people saying it’s time to retire and stop doing this,” he said.
Kody Bessent, the CEO of Plains Cotton Growers Inc., which represents farmers who grow cotton across 4 million acres in Texas, said that land would produce 4 or 5 million bales of cotton in a typical year. Production for 2022 is projected at 1.5 million bales — a cost to the regional economy of roughly $2 billion to $3 billion, he said.
“It’s a huge loss,” he said. “It’s been a tragic year.”
From Cotton Fields to Walmart Shelves
Upland cotton is shorter and coarser than its more famous cousin, Pima cotton. It is also far more widely grown and is the staple ingredient in cheap clothes and basic household and hygiene products.
In the United States, most cotton grown is upland cotton, and the crop is concentrated in Texas. That’s unusual for a major commodity crop. While other crops such as corn, wheat and soybeans are affected by extreme weather, they are spread out geographically so that a major event afflicting some of the crop may spare the rest, said Lance Honig, an economist at the Agriculture Department.
“That’s why cotton really stands out, with this drought having such a big impact on the national crop,” Honig said.
Sam Clay of Toyo Cotton Co., a Dallas trader that buys upland cotton from farmers and sells it to mills, said the collapse of the crop had sent him scrambling. “Prices have gone sky-high, and all this is getting passed on to consumers,” he said.
Clay said he is experiencing the impacts himself. “I bought six pairs of Wranglers a year and a half ago for $35 a pair. I’m paying $58 a pair now.”
At least 50% of the denim in every pair of Wrangler and of Lee jeans is woven from U.S.-grown cotton, and the cost of that cotton can represent more than half the price tag, said Jeff Frye, the vice president of sustainability for Kontoor Brands, which owns both labels.
Frye and others who deal in denim did point out, however, that other factors have driven up price, including the ban on imports of Xinjiang cotton, high fuel costs and the complicated logistics of moving materials.
Among the cotton products most sensitive to the price of raw materials are personal care items like tampons and gauze bandages, since they require very little labor or processing like dying, spinning or weaving, said Jon Devine, an economist at Cotton Inc., a research and marketing company.
The price of Tampax, the tampon giant that sells 4.5 billion boxes globally each year, started climbing fast last year.
In an earnings call in January, Andre Schulten, chief financial officer for Procter & Gamble, which makes Tampax, said the costs of raw materials “are still a significant headwind” for the company across several products, forcing the company to raise prices.
On a recent Sunday at a Walmart in Alexandria, Virginia, several shoppers said they had noticed rising prices.
“The price of a regular box of Tampax has gone up from $9 to $11,” said Vanessa Skelton, a consultant and the mother of a 3-year-old. “That’s a regular monthly expense.”
Make Way for Polyester
Cotton farmers say that Washington can help by increasing aid in the farm bill, legislation that Congress is renewing this year.
Taxpayers have sent Texas cotton farmers an average of $1 billion annually over the past five years in crop insurance subsidies, according to Daniel Sumner, an agricultural economist at the University of California, Davis.
Farmers say they’d like expanded funding for disaster relief programs to cover the impact of increasingly severe drought and to pay farmers for planting cover crops that help retain soil moisture. They also say they hope that advances in genetically modified seeds and other technologies can help sustain Texas cotton.
But some economists say it may not make sense to continue support a crop that will no longer be viable in some regions as the planet continues to warm.
“Since the 1930s, government programs have been fundamental to growing cotton,” Sumner said. “But there’s not a particular economic argument to grow cotton in West Texas as the climate changes. Does it make any economic sense for a farm bill in Washington, D.C., to say, ‘West Texas is tied to cotton?’ No, it doesn’t.”
In the long run, it could just mean that cotton is no longer the main ingredient in everything from tampons to textiles, said Sumner, “and we’re all going to use polyester.”
Here’s What Really Matters in Preventing Dementia. It’s Not All Brain Teasers and Crosswords.
By Neal Templin – Feb. 18, 2023
Illustration by Barron’s Staff
Put down that brain teaser you torture yourself with and get your hearing tested. If you are interested in preserving brain function as you age, some of the clearest benefits come from staying socially connected, scientists have found.
That means getting a hearing aid if you can’t hear what people around you are saying. People with untreated hearing loss have a 90% higher rate of dementia than others in their age group, according to the 2020 report of the Lancet commission on dementia prevention, intervention, and care.
As America grays, seniors are looking for answers to make sure their cognitive abilities don’t expire before they do. They are told they should eat a Mediterranean diet. Get enough sleep. Avoid stress. Walk 10,000 steps a day. Lose weight.
Which one of those things actually helps? Probably all of them. Barron’s has been talking to brain scientists to learn what the research tells us about maintaining brain function. There is no one thing that protects against dementia, they tell us.
“It’s everything,” says cognitive neuroscientist Denise Park, who runs the Park Aging Brain Laboratory at the University of Texas at Dallas. “There are hundreds of skills that people possess, and you lose a lot of them if you don’t just interact with other people but with your environment.”
Park, 71 herself, makes a conscious effort to keep her brain working all the time. “Even when I wait in line, I pull out my phone and play computer games,” she says. “I never have an idle moment ever.”
Little wonder that so many seniors are obsessed with avoiding dementia. Brain health is key for both happiness in retirement and, to a large degree, financial security. “There is real evidence that people over 50 worry the most about dementia and beginning to lose their memory,” says Gill Livingston, the University College London psychiatry professor who led the Lancet commission on dementia. “It’s financial but it’s also very individual.”
Asked what she does to protect her own brain, Livingston replied that she lifts weights, tries to walk 10,000 steps a day, drinks moderately and watches her blood pressure. The 63-year-old also had her hearing tested, found hearing loss that she wasn’t aware of, and now uses hearing aids.
The modern world places a premium on remaining lucid. The advent of 401(k) savings plans over the past 40 years has transformed all of us into our own pension plan managers. Whereas our parents and grandparents simply waited for the pension check to arrive each month, now we must make complex investing decisions on our own.
Brain health is also a key for delaying—or avoiding altogether—the need for a nursing home, which can help preserve a retirement nest egg. William Bernstein, a former neurologist who became a financial author and money manager, says some mental slowing is inevitable as we age. He recommends simplifying your finances and going over your investment strategy with your children so they can take over if need be.
“There’s a good chance you won’t be as cognitively intact and you ought to make provisions for that,” says Bernstein.
The Lancet Commission combined research around the world with its own research and found 12 modifiable risk factors that in aggregate account for 40% of dementias. Some are behaviors or conditions long associated with health problems such as smoking, heavy drinking, or diabetes.
Others are more surprising. It turns out higher education levels early in life appear to protect against dementia later in life, research found. Working helps protect against dementia by keeping our brains engaged, scientists observed. The Lancet report noted that countries with lower retirement ages had higher dementia rates.
Why might education and work be protective? Livingston of the Lancet Commission says challenging intellectual activity creates a brain with denser connections that allow it to keep functioning even with the inevitable deterioration that comes with age or disease. This capacity was called “cognitive reserve” in this paper by neuropsychologist Yaakov Stern of Columbia University. “If you have cognitive reserve, you are more likely to survive without developing dementia,” Livingston explains. “We think education in itself strengthens the brain. It makes it more resilient.”
Controlling hypertension is another key in protecting your brain. High blood pressure can cause tears in the white matter of the brain over time, says Park, the UT Dallas neuroscientist. “If you get enough of those tears, you will have trouble transferring signals to the cortex of the brain,” she says. In essence, your brain will work less well.
Arterial disease also puts you at greater risk of stroke. “You can have a large number of smaller strokes, some of which you’re not even aware of and the cumulative effect is substantial cognitive decline that impairs your daily life,” said Thad Polk, a University of Michigan professor and cognitive neuroscientist who wrote “The Aging Brain” for The Great Courses.
The Lancet Commission found that middle-aged people who have systolic blood pressure more than 130 have a 60% greater chance of developing dementia down the road.
“What is good for your heart is good for your brain,” says Polk. He says numerous studies have found that exercise is one of the best things you can do to protect your brain.
But when it comes to the brain, physical health factors aren’t the entire story. A number of studies found that people who care for someone with dementia are more likely to get dementia themselves. Why? The answer appears to be that the stress of caring for someone alters their brains in ways that make it more vulnerable to dementia.
Zachary Cordner, an assistant professor of psychiatry at Johns Hopkins, has run tests on mice where he purposely stressed the rodents and found their brains changed. Mice, like humans, are normally social creatures. In one experiment, researchers would isolate a mouse all day to impose one sort of stress, and then expose it to an aggressive “bully” mouse to oppose another type of stress.
When they examined the mice’s brains, they found changes in the regions of the brain involved in learning and memory as well as mood, anxiety, and social interactions.“ It’s clear these chronic stress exposures alter the stress system in the brain,” Cordner says.
As the human brain ages, it changes. Research has found that an older brain processes information more slowly. Seniors often have declining episodic memory, which is why they have more trouble remembering where they put the keys. (Although the 66-year-old reporter writing this article can attest he had trouble remembering where he put them even when young.) Older people have more trouble mastering large bodies of new facts, even as they may remember a familiar set of facts in sharp detail.
None of this mean our brains stop working. To the contrary, an older person with a specialized skill or knowledge set may retain that to the end of their days. What their brain loses in processing power may be offset by increased experience in the world.
And what about those brain teasers mentioned at the beginning of this article? “The issue with brain games is there is good evidence you will improve at the brain games,” says Polk of the University of Michigan. “There’s not good evidence that will generalize to other areas of cognition.”
He goes on: “There is nothing wrong with playing these games. But there might be better ways to spend your time if your goal is brain health.”
Turkish Health Minister Fahrettin Koca posted about the rescues on Twitter, saying both men were pulled alive from the ruins of a collapsed building in hard-hit Hatay province on Thursday evening, 261 hours after the quake.
Mustafa Avci, 33, was rescued first, according to Koca. After initial treatment at a field hospital, Avci was allowed to call a relative whose telephone number he remembered. The health minister tweeted video of the emotional exchange, in which Avci is seen wearing a neck brace and lying on a stretcher as he speaks into a mobile phone held by a rescuer. Avci can be heard asking about his mother and the rest of their family as the man on the other end cries in disbelief. Avci then kisses the hand of the rescuer holding the phone and thanks him.
Hatay’da enkaz altından 261’inci saatte, bu gece kurtarılan Mustafa, tıbbi müdahalenin ardından ilk olarak, telefon numarasını hatırladığı bir yakınını aradı. Kardeşimiz Mustafa’yı bu kadar iyi görmekten çok mutluyuz. pic.twitter.com/t0jrmH0M6r
Mehmet Ali Sakiroglu, 26, was rescued soon after, according to Koca. Sakiroglu was assessed at the field hospital before being transported to the Mustafa Kemal University Hospital in Antakya, where he remains for treatment, Koca said. The health minister tweeted a photo of first responders bringing Sakiroglu into the hospital on a stretcher.
The 7.8 magnitude earthquake struck the region before dawn on Feb. 6 and was followed by hundreds of aftershocks. The quake’s epicenter was in Turkey’s southeastern Kahramanmaras province, not far from the border with Syria. Thousands of buildings were toppled on both sides, according to Turkish and Syrian officials.
The death toll in Turkey and Syria has continued to rise in the days since, reaching 42,000 on Thursday, according to combined figures from both countries.
Although most rescues happen within the first 24 hours after a natural disaster, experts told ABC News that people can survive for up to a week or more while trapped under fallen debris depending on several factors, including weather conditions, the extent of their injuries and whether they have access to air and water.
ABC News’ Kerem Inal and Ellie Kaufman contributed to this report.
As the Colorado River shrinks, federal officials consider overhauling Glen Canyon Dam
Ian James – February 18, 2023
The Colorado River’s decline threatens hydropower at Glen Canyon Dam. Now, officials are looking at retooling the dam to deal with low water levels. (Joshua Lott / Washington Post)
The desiccation of the Colorado River has left Lake Powell, the country’s second-largest reservoir, at just 23% of capacity, its lowest level since it was filled in the 1960s.
With the reservoir now just 32 feet away from “minimum power pool” — the point at which Glen Canyon Dam would no longer generate power for six states — federal officials are studying the possibility of overhauling the dam so that it can continue to generate electricity and release water at critically low levels.
A preliminary analysis of potential modifications to the dam emerged during a virtual meeting held by the federal Bureau of Reclamation, which is also reviewing options for averting a collapse of the water supply along the river. These new discussions about retooling the dam reflect growing concerns among federal officials about how climate change is contributing to the Colorado River’s reduced flows, and how declining reservoirs could force major changes in dam management for years to come.
Among the immediate concerns is the threat of the reservoir dropping below the dam’s power-generating threshold. If that were to occur, water would only flow through four 8-foot-wide bypass tubes, called the outlet works, which would create a chokepoint with reduced water-releasing capacity.
“There is now an acknowledgment, unlike any other time ever before, that the dam is not going to be suited to 21st century hydrology,” said Kyle Roerink, executive director of the environmental group Great Basin Water Network, who listened to the meeting. “They’re not sugarcoating that things have to change there, and they have to change pretty quickly.”
Those who participated in the Feb. 7 meeting included dozens of water mangers, representatives of electric utilities, state officials and others. They discussed proposals such as penetrating through the dam’s concrete to make new lower-level intakes, installing a new or reconfigured power plant, and tunneling a shaft around either side of the dam to a power plant, among other options.
The Interior Department declined a request for an interview, but spokesperson Tyler Cherry said in email that the briefing was part of broader conversations with state officials, tribal leaders, water managers and others “to inform our work to improve and protect the short-term sustainability of the Colorado River System and the resilience of the American West to a changing climate.”
Roerink and two other people who listened to the webinar told The Times that cost estimates for several alternatives ranged from $500 million to $3 billion. The agency will need congressional approval and will have to conduct an environmental review to analyze options.
The Bureau of Reclamation’s presentation, given by regional power manager Nick Williams, included some additional alternatives that wouldn’t require major structural modifications of the dam. Those options included adjusting operations to maximize power generation at low reservoir levels, studying ways of using the existing intakes at lower water levels, and making up for the loss of hydroelectric power by investing in solar or wind energy.
Glen Canyon Dam stands 710 feet tall, anchored to the canyon’s reddish sandstone walls in northern Arizona, about 320 miles upstream from Lake Mead, the nation’s largest reservoir. The dam has been controversial since its inception, with environmental activists and others arguing the reservoir was unnecessary and destroyed the canyon’s pristine ecosystem.
Lake Powell and Lake Mead have declined over the last 23 years during the most severe drought in centuries. Federal officials have sought to boost Powell’s levels in recent months by reducing the amount of water they release downstream until the spring runoff arrives. They’ve said they may need to further cut water releases.
A central concern is that if the water drops below minimum power pool — 3,490 feet above sea level under the current operating rules — the main intakes would need to be shut down and water would instead flow through the dam’s lower bypass tubes. Because of those tubes’ reduced capacity, that could lead to less water passing downstream, shrinking the river’s flow in the Grand Canyon and accelerating the decline of Lake Mead toward “dead pool” — the point at which water would no longer pass through Hoover Dam to Arizona, California and Mexico.
Federal officials prepared the initial studies of alternatives for Glen Canyon Dam using $2 million that the Bureau of Reclamation secured as part of $200 million for drought response efforts.
According to a slide presentation shown at the meeting, officials see potential hazards in some of the six alternatives. Piercing the dam’s concrete to create new low-level or mid-level intakes, for example, would entail “increased risk from penetration through dam,” the presentation says.
They also describe risks due to possible “vortex formation,” or the creation of whirlpools above horizontal intakes as the water level declines. Their formation could cause damage if air is pulled into the system. The presentation says one alternative would involve lowering the minimum power pool limit and possibly installing structures on the intakes to suppress whirlpools, but it said this still would not allow for the water level to go much lower.
One of the possible fixes includes installing a new power plant that would generate electricity with water flowing from the bypass tubes, or taking a similar approach using existing infrastructure. Another would involve excavating a tunnel to the left or right side of the dam, and installing a power plant underground or in the riverbed.
Other options include changing operations at both Glen Canyon and Hoover dams “to maximize power generation under low flow conditions using existing infrastructure.”
“Any of the options are going to be very expensive and they’re going to be very time-consuming,” said Leslie James, executive director of the Colorado River Energy Distributors Assn., who participated in the meeting.
James praised the Bureau of Reclamation for “starting the processes to look at structural options like this.”
“I see what they’re doing here as getting an early start and at least evaluating everything that they can to look and see what may be feasible,” James said. She said she hopes Congress will provide the necessary funding to ensure continued electricity flowing from Glen Canyon Dam, given “how important hydropower is to entire communities.”
Her association represents nonprofit electric utilities that buy power produced by Glen Canyon Dam and other dams that are part of the Colorado River Storage Project. The association includes members in Arizona, Colorado, Nevada, Utah, New Mexico and Wyoming. The utilities supply power in cities, rural areas, irrigation districts and tribal communities.
Power from the dam has long been a vital energy source, though its output has decreased dramatically in recent years as Lake Powell has declined. During the 2022 fiscal year, Glen Canyon Dam generated 2,591 gigawatt-hours of electricity, enough to power more than 240,000 average homes for a year.
James said electric utilities across the region have had to make up for the reduced hydropower by turning to other costlier sources.
“It’s a real challenging time,” James said. “And it is the people in these communities that are ultimately being impacted with higher electricity bills.”
Lake Powell’s level is projected to rise this spring with runoff from the above-average snowpack in the Rocky Mountains. But that boost in water levels is expected to have a limited effect on the deep water deficit that has accumulated over more than two decades.
And in the long term, scientific research indicates warming and drying will continue to take a major toll on the river.
Scientists have found that roughly half the decline in the river’s flow since 2000 has been caused by higher temperatures, that climate change is driving the aridification of the Southwest, and that for each additional 1 degree Celsius (1.8 degrees Fahrenheit) of warming, the river’s average flow will probably decrease about 9%.
Environmental activists have for years urged the federal government to consider draining Lake Powell, decommissioning the dam and storing the water downstream in Lake Mead.
Activists who listened to the Bureau of Reclamation’s presentation said they welcome the agency’s examination of the issues at Glen Canyon Dam but would prefer to see a broader analysis that evaluates other options, including draining the reservoir.
In a report last year, Roerink’s Great Basin Water Network and two other groups warned that the “antiquated plumbing system inside Glen Canyon Dam represents a liability to Colorado River Basin water users who may quickly find themselves in legal jeopardy and water supply shortfalls.”
“The bureau is admitting that the dam is a liability,” Roerink said. “From my perspective, that’s a good first step.”
Beyond the current focus on trying to prop up hydropower generation, Roerink said, “I think we need an option that is just a bypass option without a power plant at the end of it.”
Roerink said he expects there will be a lot of debate about issues such as evaporation from the reservoir and the high costs of modifications to the dam.
“Is it all worth it? Are the taxpayer dollars going to be worth it for those electrons?” Roerink said. “How long will it be until this just proves itself to be a futile exercise?”
John Weisheit, an activist who has advocated for removing the dam, said he was delighted to hear federal officials openly discussing these options for the first time.
“I’m glad we’re having this conversation. It’s long overdue,” said Weisheit, who is co-founder of the group Living Rivers.
Weisheit said he also thinks the agency’s alternatives aren’t broad enough, and leave unanswered questions about the dam’s life span.
“I think it’s imperative that we know exactly what the life span of this dam is,” Weisheit said. “There is so much more that needs to be discussed.”
Weisheit said one major concern should be the accumulation of sediments in the bottom of the reservoir, which, according to a recent federal survey, has lost nearly 6.8% of its water-storing capacity.
Another issue with the agency’s current alternatives, he said, is that they wouldn’t solve problems of intakes or bypass tubes sucking in air at low water levels, “just like everybody’s bathtub does,” potentially causing cavitation that would pit and tear into metal, damaging the infrastructure.
Weisheit said he also was concerned about potential threats to endangered fish in the Grand Canyon.
Overall, the modifications to the dam that the federal government is considering would be “too much investment for very little return,” Weisheit said. “And it’s going to take a long, long time.”
Weisheit said he favors the option of investing in solar and wind energy. Instead of spending up to $3 billion trying to squeeze a shrinking amount of power from the dam, he said, “you can build a lot of solar cells and turbines,” including nearby on the Navajo Nation, which needs electricity.
Weisheit said he thinks the situation shows Glen Canyon Dam isn’t needed.
“Take the dam out,” he said, “because it’s not the right dam for climate change.”
Water crisis in West: Massive reservoir Lake Powell hits historic low water level
Colorado River Basin water levels drop to historic low, states mandated to cut use More water is being taken from the river than it can provide.
Elizabeth Weise, USA TODAY – February 18, 2023
Lake Powell, the nation’s second-largest reservoir and one that provides water and power to millions of people in southern California, has reached its lowest levels since its first filling in the 1960s.
Its companion reservoir, Lake Mead, is at levels almost as low.
Together, these reservoirs, fed by the mighty Colorado River, provide the water 40 million Americans depend on. Despite the storms that brought heavy rain and snow to California and other Western states in January, experts say it would take years of such weather to replenish the West’s water resources.
“In the year 2000, the two reservoirs were 95% full. They’re roughly 25% full now,” said Brad Udall, a water and climate scientist at Colorado State University. “It’s hard to overstate how important the Colorado River is to the entire American southwest.”
What to know about the West’s ongoing water crisis:
An abandoned and once-sunken boat sits along the shoreline of Lake Powell in this May 2022 file photo. The white ring above shows how high the water level was when the lake was full.
What is Lake Powell?
Lake Powell is the nation’s second-largest reservoir. It was created by blocking the Colorado River at Glen Canyon in southern Utah and northern Arizona.
It stores water as part of the Colorado River Compact and produces electricity through the hydroelectric turbines in Glen Canyon dam.
Work on the dam that created Lake Powell began in 1956 and was finished in 1966. It took 16 years for it to fill. At its highest, in 1983, the lake was 3,708 feet above sea level.
Lake Powell hasn’t been this low since June of 1965, just two years after it began to fill with water.
The biggest worry: If the lake’s level falls much lower, it won’t be possible to get water out of it.
Why? Tubes that run water through its out of the lake and into eight hydroelectric turbines could soon be above the water. There are bypass tubes available below that point, but they weren’t designed for continuous use, so it’s not clear how they would fare.
Important quote: “If you can’t get water out of the dam, it means everyone downstream doesn’t get water,” said Udall. “That includes agriculture, cities like Los Angeles, San Diego and Phoenix.”
Will water stop flowing? “That’s a doomsday scenario,” said Bill Hasencamp, Colorado River resources manager for the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California. Before things get to that point the Department of the Interior will require reductions in use.
How long until water stops flowing downstream? If the lake falls another 32 feet – about the amount it fell in the past year – power generation concerns become more urgent, Udall said. Snowmelt this spring is forecast to bring levels up somewhat.
Why is the water level so low?
The water in Lake Powell is low because the amount of water in the Colorado River has been falling for decades. At the same time, demand has risen due to increased population growth in the West.
Overall, the river’s flow is down 20% in this century relative to the 20th century.
More than four scientific studies have pinned a large part of the decline on human climate change. It’s partly that there’s less rain and snow, partly that as temperatures rise, plants use more water and more water evaporates out of the soil which would otherwise have ended up in the river. In addition, the river itself experiences more evaporation.
“It’s unfortunate that the largely natural occurrence of a drought has coincided with this increasing warming due to greenhouse gases,” said Flavio Lehner, a professor of atmospheric sciences at Cornell University. “That has brought everything to a head much earlier than people thought it would.”
What about Lake Mead and the Hoover Dam?
Lake Mead is the nation’s largest reservoir, a companion to Lake Powell. Mead was created when the Hoover Dam was completed in 1935. It supplies water and power to Arizona, California, New Mexico and Mexico.
Lake Mead’s level is 1,047 feet above sea level. You would have to go back to April of 1937, also two years into its initial filling, to find levels that low. It is forecast to have a new record low next summer, said Hasencamp.
The lake isn’t low enough yet to cause concerns about getting water out, but any hope of it refilling is years away, if ever, due to lowered rain and snow and increasing evaporation.
Some of America’s largest cities depend on the water from Lake Mead. “It’s 90% of the water supply to Las Vegas, 50% to Phoenix, effectively 100% to Tucson and 25% to Los Angeles,” said Udall.
What will happen if water levels keep dropping?
The Department of the Interior had asked the seven states of the Colorado River Compact to come up with a plan to cut between 2 and 4 million acre-feet of water by January. They weren’t able to come up with an agreement.
Because of that, it’s expected that the Department of the Interior’s Bureau of Reclamation, which oversees water management, will mandate one sometime next year.
“This is apparently a decent (water) year, but still, if it turns dry again there are some pretty big reductions on tap and every state could be affected,” said Hasencamp.
It will be painful but it doesn’t mean the area can’t thrive.
“The West might look different,” said Hasencamp. “You might not see the lush lawns of today and endless fields of alfalfa, but you will see thriving communities and agricultural regions.”
How COVID-19 Changes the Heart—Even After the Virus Is Gone
Alice Park – February 18, 2023
Red heart shape and heartbeat symbol, cardiogram, health care concept.
Credit – iStockphoto—Getty Images
While COVID-19’s effects on the lungs and respiratory system are well known, there is growing research suggesting that the virus is also affecting the heart, with potentially lasting effects.
In a presentation at the annual meeting of the Biophysical Society, an international biophysics scientific group, Dr. Andrew Marks, chair of the department of physiology at Columbia University, and his colleagues reported on changes in the heart tissue of COVID-19 patients who had died from the disease, some of whom also had a history of heart conditions. The team conducted autopsy analyses and found a range of abnormalities, particularly in the way heart cells regulate calcium.
All muscles, including those in the heart, rely on calcium to contract. Muscle cells store calcium and open special channels inside of cells to release it when needed. In some conditions such as heart failure, the channel remains open in a desperate attempt to help the heart muscle contract more actively. The leaking of calcium ultimately depletes the calcium stores, weakening the muscle in the end.
“We found evidence, in the hearts of COVID-19 patients, abnormalities in the way calcium is handled,” says Marks. In fact, when it came to their calcium systems, the heart tissue of these 10 people who had died of COVID-19 looked very similar to that of people with heart failure.
Marks plans to further explore the heart changes that SARS-CoV-2 might cause by studying how the infection affects the hearts of mice and hamsters. He intends to measure changes in immune cells as well as any alterations in heart function in the animals both while they are infected and after they have recovered in order to document any lingering effects.
“The data we present show that there are dramatic changes in the heart,” Marks says. “The precise cause and long term consequences of those need to be studied more.”
Previous studies have revealed a link between COVID-19 infections and heart-related problems. A large 2022 analysis of patients in the VA system—some of whom had recovered from COVID-19 and others who had never been diagnosed—showed those who had had COVID-19 had higher rates of a number of heart-related risks, including irregular heartbeats heart attack and stroke. Dr. Susan Cheng, chair of women’s cardiovascular health and population science at Cedars-Sinai, is studying whether there are any associations between rates of heart attacks and surges of COVID-19 infections, in order to better understand how the virus might be affecting the heart.
There is also early evidence showing that people with hypertension may be at higher risk of heart events when they get COVID-19.
What connects the viral infection to the heart isn’t known yet, but the body’s immune system is likely a major contributor. “It’s been well documented that with SARS-CoV-2, the body responds with an inflammatory response that involves activating the immune system in a very dramatic way,” says Marks. “In the heart, it looks like the same inflammatory process is activating pathways that could be detrimental to heart function.” But more research needs to clarify that process, says Dr. Mariell Jessup, chief science and medical officer at the American Heart Association. “If the assumption is that the infection causes inflammation, and the assumption is that the inflammation is precipitating more cardiovascular events, then how is it doing that?”
It’s also possible that viruses can infect and adversely affect heart cells. “We’re still at the tip of the iceberg with respect to understanding how COVID-19 affects health,” says Cheng.
Marks is hoping to get some of those answers with the animal experiments he plans to conduct. “We hope to optimize the animal model to best reflect what we think is going on in patients,” he says. “We want to study at a very, very detailed level what happens in the heart when the virus infects an animal.”
Ultimately, that knowledge will help to better treat people who might be at higher risk of heart-related problems from COVID-19, which could in turn reduce hospitalizations and deaths from the disease. Marks has already developed a potential drug that can address the leaking calcium if that proves to be a problem with COVID-19; he is ready and eager to test it if his animal studies justify the experiments.
Until more definitive studies clarify how the COVID-19 virus is affecting the heart, Jessup says she would advise her patients to “control the things we know how to control,” such as the risk factors that might put them at higher risk of heart disease to begin with, such as obesity, high blood pressure, and high cholesterol. And with more data emerging, if people are getting repeat COVID-19 infections, it’s also probably worth seeing their doctor to get their heart disease risk factors checked as well.
“We spend a lot of time telling people they should get vaccinated,” she says. “For people who have had COVID-19, we should also be making sure they know their heart numbers and make sure they know blood pressure. “We know how to prevent heart disease, so let’s do the things we know how to do.”
Donna St. George, Katherine Reynolds Lewis and Lindsey Bever, The Washington Post – February 17, 2023
When Sophie Nystuen created a website for teens who had experienced trauma, her idea was to give them space to write about the hurt they couldn’t share. The Brookline, Mass., 16-year-old received posts about drug use and suicide. But a majority wrote about sexual violence.
“Every time I’ve tried, my throat feels like it’s closing, my lungs forget how to breathe,” wrote one anonymous poster. “I was sexually assaulted.”
These expressions of inner crisis are just a glint of the startling data reported by federal researchers this week. Nearly 1 in 3 high school girls said they had considered suicide, a 60 percent rise in the past decade. Nearly 15 percent had been forced to have sex. About 6 in 10 girls were so persistently sad or hopeless they stopped regular activities.
The new report represents nothing short of a crisis in American girlhood. The findings have ramifications for a generation of young women who have endured an extraordinary level of sadness and sexual violence – and present uncharted territory for the health advocates, teachers, counselors and parents who are trying to help them.
The data comes from the Youth Risk Behavior Survey, conducted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention from a nationally representative sample of students in public and private high schools. “America’s teen girls are engulfed in a growing wave of sadness, violence and trauma,” the CDC said.
“It’s alarming,” Education Secretary Miguel Cardona said Thursday of the report. “But as a father of a 16-year-old and 19-year-old, I hear about it. It’s real. I think students know what’s going on. I think sometimes the adults are just now realizing how serious it is.”
But high school girls are speaking out, too, about stresses that started before the pandemic – growing up in a social media culture, with impossible beauty standards, online hate, academic pressure, economic difficulties, self doubt and sexual violence. The isolation and upheaval of covid made it tougher still.
When Caroline Zuba started cutting her arms in ninth grade, she felt trapped: by conflict at home, by the school work that felt increasingly meaningless, by the image her friends and teachers had of a bubbly, studious girl. Cutting replaced the emotional pain with a physical pain.
She confided in a trusted teacher, who brought in the school counselors and her mother. But Zuba’s depression worsened and, at age 15, she attempted suicide. That sparked the first of a series of hospitalizations over the summer and subsequent school year.
Now a 17-year-old junior at a public high school in Potomac, Md., Zuba relies on therapy, medication, exercise and coping strategies. She started a mental health club at her high school to support classmates also struggling with depression, anxiety and suicidal thoughts.
At the lowest point of her depression, she said, she kept many secrets from her friends, parents and teachers because she felt stuck in her role: a cheerful high achiever who had it all together.
“My mom’s like my best friend and there’s no way she would have ever expected it,” Zuba said. “Teens are really good at hiding it, which is really sad.”
While the teen mental health crisis was clear before the CDC report, the stark findings have jolted parents and the wider public.
“These are not normal numbers,” said Surgeon General Vivek H. Murthy. “When you grow up with this, I think the risk is thinking, ‘Well, this is just how it is.'”
The reasons girls are in crisis are likely complex, and may vary by race, ethnicity, class and culture. Harvard psychologist Richard Weissbourd points out that “girls are more likely to respond to pain in the world by internalizing conflict and stress and fear, and boys are more likely to translate those feelings into anger and aggression,” masking their depression.
Weissbourd added that girls also are socialized not to be aggressive and that in a male-dominated culture girls can be gaslit into thinking there is something wrong with them when problems or conflicts arise. “They can be prone to blaming themselves,” he said.
Jean Twenge, a psychology professor at San Diego State University and author of the book “iGen,” said that increases in most measures of poor mental health in the past decade were more pronounced for girls than boys.
She said part of the problem is that digital media has displaced the face-to-face time teens once had with friends, and that teens often don’t get enough sleep. Adding to those influences are the hours teens spend scrolling social media. For girls, she said, this often means “comparing your body and your life to others and feeling that you come up wanting.”
That’s not to say everything that people do on smartphones is problematic, Twenge said. “It’s just social media in general and internet use show the strongest correlations with depression,” she said.
Ben Handrich, a school counselor at South Salem High School in Salem, Ore., said teen girls often feel that “people are watching them – that no matter what they do, there’s this invisible audience judging their movements, their actions, the way they smile, the way they eat.”
Lisa Damour, a clinical psychologist and author of “The Emotional Lives of Teenagers,” said it’s important to note that the CDC data was collected in the fall of 2021, a time when many teens were anxious about returning to in-person school and wearing masks.
“Teenagers were miserable,” Damour said. “It absolutely confirms what we were looking at clinically at that time. We don’t know what the next wave of data will tell us.”
Damour noted that the CDC findings are distressing because today’s teens, in many ways, are in better physical health and more risk-averse than most previous generations.
“We’re raising the best-behaved generation of teenagers on record,” said Damour. “They drive with seat belts, they smoke less, they have less sex, they wear helmets. They do all these things that we did not do.”
And yet they are in crisis.
Many girls across the country describe teen cultures of casual slut-shaming, of peers greeting girls with sexist slurs such as “whore” or “ho,” based on what they wear or how they look.
In Los Angeles, Elida Mejia Elias says it’s a no-win situation. “If you’re skinny, they judge you for being skinny and if you’re fat, they judge you for being fat,” explains the 18-year-old, a senior.
In ninth grade, a friend of Mejia Elias’s sent a naked picture of herself to a boy she was dating, at his urging, and he spread it around to his friends. “Everyone was talking bad about her. They were calling her names, like ‘ho,'” said Mejia Elias. “That affected her mental health. She needed to get therapy.”
In Maryland, at her Bethesda public high school, 14-year old Tulip Kaya said that girls in her friend group hear whistles or “gross comments” about their breasts and are texted unsolicited penis pictures by boys at school. “If there’s anything slightly unique about you, you’re not going to have a fun time, and you will be targeted,” she said.
Social media can be overwhelming. “On Snapchat and TikTok, you see all these pretty girls with tiny waists and a big bottom. I know I’m only 14, but it makes me feel like there’s something wrong with myself,” Kaya said. “When I start to feel like that, I will delete the app for a little while.”
Girls interviewed by The Post expressed uncertainty and self-doubt over everything from what to wear, what to post or comment on social media, what it meant if someone wasn’t following them back on a social platform, and even in daily interactions. When in-person school resumed, during the fall of 2021 for many, routine encounters and moments felt weird after a year or more of separation from peers.
“Sometimes I don’t want to wear shorts because I don’t have the body type I had in middle school,” said Leilah Villegas, of Eastvale, Calif., who ran track before the pandemic. Now in 10th grade, she’s started running again but her changed body brings pangs of self-consciousness.
Aanika Arjumand, 16, from Gaithersburg, Md., who sits on her county’s Domestic Violence Coordinating Council, said she was not surprised by the increases in sexual violence.
“We deal with a lot of cases on like teen dating violence and kind of informing schools about teen dating violence because the health curriculum right now basically does not cover abuse or sexual violence as much as it should,” she said.
School itself can sometimes be physically unsafe, as happened with Harker, a 13-year old in Savannah, Ga., who spoke on the condition that her full name not be used because of the sensitivity of the issue.
At school, she received unwanted attention from a boy in sixth grade. He would whisper in her ears and grab her shoulders. Once, he seized her across her chest and did not release her until she screamed. A teacher was nearby, but she said the boy went unpunished and remained in her classes. The teen has resorted to learning at home.
“They didn’t believe me even though there were witnesses,” she said. “A boy in school can get away with something, but if I do one mess-up, I get called out for it.
At the Bronx High School of Science in New York, 17-year-old Najiha Uddin talks about a White beauty standard perpetuated in mainstream and social media, which she says girls of color can’t possibly meet. She and others describe status-oriented peers and media messages about shoes, clothes, styles and experiences that outstrip their families’ means.
For Montanna Norman, 18, a senior at a private high school in Washington during the fall of 2021, the killing of unarmed Black men by police was foremost in her mind after the murder of George Floyd. At the time she was the co-leader of her school’s Black Student Union. “The toll that that took on my mental health was a lot,” she said.
Some of her friends have contemplated, or attempted, suicide, Norman said. “You wish you could do more to help,” she said.
Garvey Mortley, a 14-year old in Bethesda, Md., who is Black, said she has been teased because of her hair and still feels microaggressions. “Racism can be a stressor for depression or a cause of depression because of the bullying that happens, not just Black kids but Asian kids and Hispanic kids who feel they are unwanted,” she said.
Students who are LGBTQ face some of the highest rates of depressive symptoms and sexual violence, including rape. In 2021, nearly 1 in 4 reported an attempt to take their life.
Rivka Vizcardo-Lichter, a student activist in Virginia, pointed out that high school is a time when many LGBTQ students are still figuring out who they are and solidifying their identity. “Even if you have an accepting environment around you, you are aware that there are millions of people who don’t want you to exist,” she said.
Some of the most alarming data collected by the CDC involved the rise in suicidal thoughts among teen girls – 24 percent of teen girls have made a plan for suicide while 13 percent have attempted it, almost twice the rate for boys.
Rich and Trinna Walker, from New Albany, Ind., searched for a therapist for their 13-year-old daughter Ella but struggled to find one in the overloaded mental health-care system during the pandemic. Once Ella finally started treatment, however, her demeanor seemed to improve, they said.
“I really felt like she was doing so much better,” Trinna Walker said. Ella had been asking her dad how she could earn extra money to buy a birthday gift for her sister. She told her mom she wanted doughnuts for breakfast.
“Then we woke up to a nightmare the next morning,” Trinna said.
Ella died by suicide on Jan. 22, 2022. Her parents said they wish someone would have alerted them to the warning signs. Unknown to them, Ella was being bullied, and she was devastated by a breakup, they said.
Now the couple is urging teens to speak up when their peers are in trouble. “It was like a bomb going off,” Rich Walker said. “It’s like it mortally wounded my wife and me and Ella’s two older sisters, and then it reverberated outwardly to her friends.”
Many of the girls interviewed for this story asked that adults listen to and believe girls, and stop dismissing their concerns as drama. “Adults don’t get all the pressure that teenage girls have to deal with, from appearance to the way they act to how smart they are, to the things they do,” said Villegas, the Eastvale 10th-grader. “It can be very overwhelming.”
Asma Tibta, a 10th-grader in Fairfax County, Va., said she is “close friends” with her mother, but doesn’t talk about mental health at home. “I haven’t told her too much. And I don’t plan to.”
In Savannah, Harker took a break from playing Roblox with her friend to be interviewed. Before heading back to the game, she had one request: “I want adults to believe young girls.”
The Washington Post’s Serena Marshall contributed to this report.
If you or someone you know needs help, visit 988lifeline.org or call or text the Suicide & Crisis Lifeline at 988.
