Fifty is a big milestone year in life. It means you’ve lived half a century and gained half a century’s worth of wisdom and experience. It should also mean that you begin regularly undergoing important medical tests for risk factors that increase with age. Some of these tests are for both genders, while others are more important and needed for men. In this article, we’ll cover six different medical exams that you should be doing to make sure you live a healthy life over the next half century. 

Recommended Diagnostic Tests: 

Colonoscopy

The dreaded colonoscopy is the most well-known of these diagnostics. Although not exclusive to them, the colonoscopy is most commonly done on those over the age of fifty, and once you pass that age your doctor will certainly be requesting you get one. The test is done to detect cancer in the colon and rectum and is an important way to find cancer early. Unfortunately, the process for a colonoscopy is not a fun one and requires you to clean out your bowels completely in the lead up to the exam, which consists of the colonoscope being inserted through the rectum. Fortunately, the exam is only needed once every ten years if no cancerous growths are found in the initial one.

Cholesterol Check

You should begin having this test regularly long before turning fifty,but past that age it becomes even more important to stay on top of and aware of. A cholesterol test checks your cholesterol levels, including finding the levels you possess for each of the types of cholesterol. The most important part of this is making sure you don’t have unhealthy levels of the bad forms of cholesterol, which can cause heart disease or strokes if high enough. This test is one that can be dreaded much less than the colonoscopy since it only requires a blood sample to be sent to a lab for testing. You should get this test once every five years if results retum with healthy levels of cholesterol. Eve Exam – Vision only worsens with age, and oftentimes it is hard to recognize that your vision has gradually worsened over a period of time, so getting routine eye exams is an important part of life once you reach fifty and over. Additionally, eye conditions tend to occur more commonly with age, so eye exams are a useful way to annually check for if a ny have developed. Eye exams depend on the examiner, but almost always involve testing your vision, examining for any signs of a condition developing, and checking for coordination. Most people are alright with an eye exam once every one or two years, but you should default to the recommendation of your optometrist as it depends on each person.

 Prostate Specific Antigen Test

Once men reach over the age of 50 one of the mostimportant health conditions to monitor is the development of prostate cancer, which is one of the most dangerous diseases for men in that age range. PSA tests check a protein produced by prostates to determine if there is any presence of cancerous cells. The test is a simple blood test, but it is not uncommon for these tests to produce inconclusive results which may require a rectal exam. If your results come back as desired, you will likely be able to wait until 60 before having to take another test.

Blood Sugar and Blood Pressure Tests

While these are two separate tests, they go hand in hand with each other as tests relating to important factors within your blood. The first is a blood sugar screening. Blood sugar screening should be done once you turn 45. High levels of blood sugar can indicate diabetes, as well as the potential for other risk factors to develop. This makes it important to stay on top of. The test is done by fasting for eight hours prior to the exam before having your blood drawn. Blood sugar tests only need to be done once every three years if results come back positive. Blood pressure screenings are arguably the more important of the two and should begin regularly once you tum 50, although they are done at virtually every annual checkup throughout life. These tests monitor your blood pressure to make sure they are not dangerously high as that can lead to an increased risk of fatal heart attacks and strokes. These tests don’t require inserting a probe or drawing blood. A cuff is placed around the arm before your examiner will begin tightening it to cut off the circulation in your arm. This test will be completed yearly at your annual checkup.

Healthy Aging and Cognitive Decline

Everyone ages, and with that comes wisdom and experience, but also some scary realities for many people. Near, or at the top of the list of harsh realities is cognitive decline. Cognitive decline happens naturally, as well as a result of some age related diseases, and to different extents for person to person.

Understanding Cognitive Decline

Cognitive decline is the worsening of brain functions, which most commonly takes the form of increased confusion and memory loss. It can be scary to deal with and heartbreaking to watch happen to loved ones, even if it is a natural part of life, so a natural desire is to know more about what can make it worse and how it can be slowed down. It may come as a surprise, but one thing that has connections with cognitive decline is our personality traits. In this blog post, we’ll explore what exactly is meant with personality traits, as well as how they connect to cognitive decline and what can be done with them to help slow it down. 

What are Personality Traits?

Now, this may seem like a silly question. After all, we all know what a personality trait is, and we all have a multitude of personality traits. In official terms, our personality traits are the internal characteristics that remain consistent within us and are able to explain why a person makes the actions they make. Personality traits can even be used predictively as a way to anticipate future actions and reactions a person may have in a situation. There are five primary personality traits: agreeableness, conscientiousness, extraversion, neuroticism, and openness. Agreeableness relates to how helpful and kind a person is, conscientiousness is about a person’s discipline and organization, extraversion correlates with friendliness and how outgoing someone is, neuroticism is anxiousness, and openness pertains to a person’s level of curiosity and perceptiveness. With all of these, these traits exist on a gradient and interrelate with one another to form the unique mixture that makes each and every person unique. 

How do Personality Traits Relate to Cognitive Decline?

While the connection may not seem obvious, personality traits can have a major impact on numerous aspects of health, including physical well-being. However, for the sake of this article, we’ll only be covering its connection with cognitive decline. Simply put, the way our personality traits make us think can cause our cognitive health to be better or worse. Studies have shown that having low levels of conscientiousness and high levels of neuroticism can have a dramatic effect on cognitive health and decline, in a negative way. For people who fall under this umbrella, these traits can increase the likelihood and rate of cognitive decline, as well as give them an increased chance of developing Dementia and mild cognitive impairment.

Of course, with information that can be quite stressful it would be wrong to give it without some positive news. While personality traits don’t usually change on their own, they aren’t set in stone and can be lessened through conscious effort. Going to therapy to help address issues with neuroticism, developing the habit of thinking in a positive, goal-oriented way, and increasing cognitive flexibility through mental exercises or mediation are all ways that can help lessen the degree to which you have neuroticism and low conscientiousness. This in turn can lower your risk of developing cognitive decline and associated conditions.