Those first strands of gray hair They are a sign of the inevitable. We are getting older and our bodies are changing. Our waist may round out a little, we may wake up in the night, or we may feel a little stiffer in the morning. However, as we adapt to new realities, we should not dismiss every symptom as just more evidence of aging.

How do you know when to ignore your body’s failings or when to seek medical advice? What is normal aging and what is not?

“Aging, in itself, is a subtle and silent process,” says Dr. Marie Bernard, deputy director of the National Institute on Aging. If you have a sudden change or feel pain, that’s a red flag, she says.

“Many patients have come and complained of pain in the knee. They said, ‘It’s just my age,'” says Bernard, a geriatrician. “The reality of the matter is both knees they have the same age. Why does one knee hurt and the other doesn’t?

We shouldn’t think of aging as a failure of our body systems, says Dr. Kenneth Minaker, chief of geriatric medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston and associate professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School. “Aging is a life-saving process,” he says. “It’s a lifelong adaptation process to prevent us from developing cancers that would kill us.”

Natural changes in cells can slow them down or alter their capacity, he says. Most people reach their peak functioning around age 30.

How quickly you notice age-related changes in endurance, strength, or sensory perception will vary depending on your personal health choices, your medical history, and your genetics, Minaker says.

Your access to health care and education, income, neighborhood, and community can also influence your health. These are what experts call “social determinants of health” among groups of people. Social determinants of health can lead to health disparities. The CDC defines health disparities as “avoidable differences in the burden of disease, injury, violence, or opportunities for optimal health that occur among socially disadvantaged groups.” For example, certain conditions (such as diabetes and high blood pressure) are more common in some minority groups than among whites.

Some age-related complaints are common and some symptoms are not caused by aging at all. Here are some tips on how to tell the difference:

Around age 40, almost everyone will resort to reading glasses. Presbyopia occurs when the lens becomes rigid and does not adjust to refocus from distance to near vision. Cataracts, or clouding of the lens, can begin to affect your vision when you reach 60 years old. Prolonged exposure to sunlight increases the risk of waterfallswhich can be corrected by surgery to replace the lens.

If you notice that you have worse peripheral than central visionor vice versa, you could have a serious problem eye condition requiring treatment. Glaucoma It occurs when the pressure in the eye increases and causes damage to the optic nerve. Two forms of macular degeneration affect the center of the retina and cause a loss of central vision.

The bottom line: “If you feel like you have blurred vision or Sight lossyou should get your eyes examined,” says Hilary Beaver, MD, associate professor of clinical ophthalmology at Weil Cornell Medical College at Methodist Hospital in Houston. It’s also a good idea to get preventive checkups, especially if you have diabetes or a family history of glaucoma either macular degenerationshe says.

Approximately one third of people aged 60 or older have some hearing loss. This condition, known as presbycusis, may be due to the loss of sensory receptors in the inner ear. At first, some sounds may seem muffled and high-pitched voices may be harder to understand. Men tend to have more hearing loss that the women.

Pain, drainage from the ear, or rapid hearing loss could be signs of a tumor or infection, warns Dr. Robert Dobie, professor of otolaryngology at the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio. . If hearing in one ear is noticeably worse than the other, that’s also a reason to get it tested, he says.

“If people just notice that I don’t hear as well as I did a few years ago, that’s the aging process,” Dobie says. “If I don’t hear as well this week as I did last week, that’s not the aging process.”

As we age we lose muscle tissue and our muscles become stiffer and less toned. Weight training and extension improve strength and flexibility, although we cannot completely counteract this natural course of aging.

Our organs also lose their extra reserve. the walls of the heart become thicker, the arteries They are stiffer and heart rate decreases as we age. The aging heart is one of the main reasons why it can be more difficult to exercise vigorously when we are older than when we were in our 20s. However, maintaining regular aerobic activity (even just walking) can improve our endurance.

When should you worry? Get an immediate evaluation if you have chest painespecially with dizziness, nauseadifficulty breathing, or Fainting. These are possible signs of a myocardial infarction. Problems with your heart rhythm can cause lightheadedness, dizziness, or fatigue.

One in 10 people aged 65 or older has anemiaor a low level of oxygen-carrying red blood cells. May cause fatigue and can be treated with iron supplements either medicines to stimulate the body to produce more red blood cells.

Aging is not a disease, but changes in our body make us vulnerable to some medical conditions.

An example is essential hypertension or high blood pressure. The exact cause of essential hypertension is unknown. There are several factors that play a role, including genetic factors, obesity, salt intake, and aging. Blood vessels tend to become less elastic with age and this stiffness can contribute to hypertension.

More than half of people aged 60 or older have hypertension – a reading of 130 (systolic) over 80 (diastolic) or higher.

A low sodium diet exerciseand maintaining a healthy weight can help prevent hypertension.

Don’t remember where you put the keys? Did you forget the name of an acquaintance you haven’t seen in a while? These momentary lapses are normal.

There’s no need to worry unless forgetting affects your daily life, says John Q. Trojanowski, MD, PhD, co-director of the Neurodegenerative Disease Research Center and professor of geriatric medicine and gerontology at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. “Many of us have a memory problem, but it is not dementia or illness,” he says.

Generally, information processing slows down as we age, and older people have more trouble multitasking. But there is a lot of variability in cognitive function. It is not surprising, for example, that older adults outperform younger adults in their knowledge of the world.

The warning sign of dementia related to Alzheimer’s disease is the inability to learn and retain new information. Problems with episodic memory are a sign of mild cognitive impairment that could be a precursor to the disease, according to new diagnostic guidelines Alzheimer’s‘s.

People with Alzheimer’sThey also have other cognitive deficits, such as problems with language or object recognition, Trojanowski says. Biomarkers detected through imaging or a cerebrospinal fluid test can help in the diagnosis of Alzheimer’s.

If you have memory problems and have a family history of Alzheimer’s disease, you may want to be evaluated. Alzheimer’s disease rarely occurs among people under 65 years of age. About one in eight people ages 65 to 74 have Alzheimer’s, and 43% of people over age 85 have Alzheimer’s.