by Michael Yonas, DrPH

This month’s special section on aging and mobility is a continuation of the monthly series started last year, focusing on health disparities in the Pittsburgh region. It is a collaboration among the New Pittsburgh Courier, Community PARTners (a core service of the University of Pittsburgh’s Clinical and Translational Science Institute—CTSI) and the Urban League of Greater Pittsburgh. Michael Yonas, DrPH, assistant professor of family medicine at Pitt, sat down with Esther L. Bush, president and CEO of the Urban League, to talk about this month’s focus.

MY: Ms. Bush, your opinion on the previous health disparities and research awareness segments has been so insightful. What are your thoughts about this month’s overview on healthy aging?

(ARA)—With 10,000 Americans turning 65 every day—and according to recently released research, a majority of them expecting to live to nearly 90—the celebration of older Americans is a developing trend, and more people are aspiring to live longer and better than ever before.

The latest research conducted by Gallup and Robinson as part of Pfizer’s Get Old initiative asked more than 1,000 Americans 18 to 65+ years old how they feel about getting old. The results showed that priorities and perceptions about aging shift over time.

Key findings of the research include:

• Nearly half of those over 50 (41 percent) said they were “optimistic” about getting old as compared with “uneasy”, “angry” or “prepared”

The Clinical and Translational Science Institute has one mission: to facilitate the translation of research advances into clinical and public health practice and policy—bridging the laboratory bench to patient bedside to community-based practice. To achieve this goal, CTSI is working to join together existing programs with new initiatives to create an awareness and understanding of the benefits to health that can be realized from research. CTSI has established 10 core divisions to take on this mission. Community PARTners (Partnering to Assist Research and Translation) is one of these cores. It aims to be an essential link between the University and the community, which is why they are teaming up with the Urban League of Greater Pittsburgh and the New Pittsburgh Courier to let people know about health information and research that is going on right now.

Grocery shopping, playing with the kids, bathing, going to work—these are activities many of us do regularly without much thought. But, imagine if you had trouble moving around or walking: How would you perform the demands of daily life? Most of us take good mobility—the ability to move well and easily—for granted, but it is one of the most important ways to stay healthy and is one of the most common ways our function becomes limited as we age. In fact, studies have shown that walking speed is a powerful predictor of how healthy you are and will be in the future. By age 75, more than half of us will have trouble walking just a few blocks (as seen in Figure 1).