The Surprises of Aging

We know the most obvious signs of aging. Wrinkles. Gray hair. Sags and bags.

But for some of us, entering into our later years means some surprises.

Most women will grow thicker through the middle and flabbier in their thighs and arms. The hair on their head might thin while the fine, pale hair on their faces might grow heavier and darker.

Men, too, tend to thicken through the middle with age. Many will lose hair on top of their heads and gain hair in their noses and ears.

While men and women will shrink in height, their noses and ears will grow.

Their eyelids will droop, their jowls will sag, and their skin will grow thin. They will develop freckles, age spots and spider veins on their faces.

And their brains will actually shrink.

Oh, joy.

I talked to three doctors -- Dr. Chip Celestino, Dr. William Palmer Jr. and Dr. Suzanne Hess -- about what happens to people as they grow older.

Celestino is a professor of family and community medicine at Wake Forest University School of Medicine and the director of the department of geriatrics at Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center. Palmer is a doctor of rehabilitation medicine at Whitaker Rehab Center. Hess is a dermatologist.

Aging comes from internal forces, such as genetics, and external forces, such as smoking and sun exposure. We can slow the clock by maintaining good health habits, and we can also take advantage of cosmetic surgery to keep ourselves looking youthful.

But some forces of nature simply cannot be denied. They are born within us.

Take the loss of height, for example. Celestino said that the discs between our vertebrae contain a lot of water; the amount of water decreases as we age, and the vertebrae squeeze closer together, diminishing our height. Even if they do everything right, Celestino said, people at age 70 are not the same height that they were at age 25.

Even people who exercise and eat well will have a hard time keeping the same hard body that they may have had when they were 30, he said. As men and women age, the fat content of their bodies goes up, and muscles atrophy. A while back, when photographs surfaced of Arnold Schwarzenegger, the governor of California, in a tiny swimsuit, it was obvious that his bodybuilding days were far behind him. He looked like a lot of men older than 50, with sagging skin and flab around his middle.

It's the rare person who can work hard enough to keep a trim, muscular body into old age. Some people get lucky with genetics and stay slim. But most of us go at least a little to seed.