When most people think of insulin, they think of diabetes — a disease that arises when, for one reason or another, insulin can't do the critical job of helping the body process sugar. But the hormone has another, less well-known function. It's also necessary for muscle growth, increasing blood flow through muscle tissue, encouraging nutrients to disperse from blood vessels and itself serving as a biochemical signal to boost muscle protein synthesis and cell proliferation.

Planning for emergencies must take into account the growing numbers of frail elderly people who will by virtue of shifting demographics be involved in any natural or manmade disaster, according to US researchers writing in the International Journal of Emergency Management.

Doctors have always hoped that scientists might one day create a vaccination that would treat a broad spectrum of maladies. They could only imagine that there might be one vaccine that would protect against, say, 2,500 strains of Salmonella. And what if that same vaccine could help protect the elderly?

Britain's post-war baby boomers, associated throughout their lives with social change, are failing to break new ground in their approach to growing old.

Volunteering for environmental protection activities can be physically and mentally sustaining for older people, according to the latest issue of Public Policy & Aging Report (PPAR). In fact, this demographic group is in a unique position to have a noticeable impact on its surroundings.

Commonly viewed as an inevitable consequence of aging and often ignored in clinical practice, falls among the elderly were cut by 11 percent when researchers at Yale School of Medicine used a combination of fall prevention educational campaigns and interventions aimed at encouraging clinicians to incorporate fall-risk assessment and management into their practices.

Elderly men with higher activity of the hormone IGF-1—or insulin-growth factor 1—appear to have greater life expectancy and reduced cardiovascular risk, according to a new study accepted for publication in the Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism (JCEM).

Researchers from the Department of Preventive Medicine and Public Health from the University of Granada have carried out a study with patients over 60.

One out of ten elderly adults on Medicare reports drinking more alcohol than is recommended, according to a new study from Brandeis University.

If you are elderly and live in California, how poor do you have to be to become eligible for public assistance?

More elderly adults are lighting up cigarettes and not reporting their nicotine habits to doctors and others, according to findings from one of the first studies to examine the accuracy of self-reported smoking habits by age, race and gender of adults 18 years and older by researchers at the Case Western Reserve University School of Dental Medicine and other university collaborators.

We often read or hear stories about older adults being conned out of their life savings, but are older individuals really more susceptible to fraud than younger adults? And, if so, how exactly does aging affect judgment and decision-making abilities?