This is the second-last issue of Age Friendly Futures. After next week the newsletter continues as Ageing Reframed, the initiative I'm building with the Multicultural Communities Council of South Australia.

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Let’s imagine two people who live through the same twelve months. One can pull back a dozen distinct things from it, the other three. Asked afterwards how long the year was, the first says long and the second says short.

A paper published in April gives that difference a name, experienced longevity, and proposes it as a third measure alongside lifespan and healthspan. (read it here)

The mechanism is memory. Judging a past year means retrieving what's there and estimating from the pile, and the brain files experience in chunks, starting a new one whenever something shifts. More distinct chunks, more to retrieve, and the year comes back long.

(This next bit is beyond my depth, so read it as reporting: The paper proposes that with age, falling mitochondrial efficiency, stiffer arteries and less precise blood flow to active brain regions leave the brain with less energy for fine-grained processing.)

Hospitals and care facilities are named in the paper, as settings where contextual change is weakly marked and the days are repetitive and externally structured. Those are the conditions where it expects the effect to show most.

The paper says a setting can do some of the chunking for the brain. It names three things: a clear start and finish, something that mattered emotionally, and a task with a purpose and a result.

So to create these dozen moments a year, whether in our industry or in our own families, what makes the difference is planning a thing for a particular person, with a reason and an end. And I think that's as true at forty as it is at ninety.

Wednesday 23 September | 10.30–11.30am ACST | Online | Free

Join us for the first Ageing Reframed panel.

Our sector has embraced dignity and person-centred care. It has paid far less attention to identity — the person's sense of who they are — and the part it plays in how people make decisions and adopt behaviours. Whether someone seeks help, stays on a medication, or accepts support at all often turns on whether the step sits with who they take themselves to be.

The panel works through that across three live problems: ageing in place and the family carers who sustain it; delayed help-seeking and medication; and culturally safe everyday care under the new Aged Care Act. With geriatrician Dr Sanka Amadoru, and Behaviour ID's Mat Crompton and Kris White.

👉 NEXT WEEK | Wednesday 5 August | 9am–5pm AEST | Establishment Ballroom, Sydney | Ticketed

A one-day forum for NDIS and aged care providers on where AI and automation are landing in day-to-day operations — rostering, compliance, intake, payroll — and where they're still rough. Hosted by Tania Gomez Consulting, the program runs across VR for dementia, AI governance, short tech showcases from a range of vendors, and a CEO roundtable to close. I'm speaking on the future of care.

You can read more here. Registering through the link below takes 20% off. 👇

A UNSW-led team followed 1,031 Sydneysiders aged 70 to 90 for up to twelve years, measuring what sat within a kilometre of each home — trees, parkland, water, shops, air pollution — against their depression scores. People with more tree cover (and shops) around them had lower scores. (read it here)

(One result came out the wrong way round. When a person's tree cover went up over the years, their depression score went up as well. However, most of those who moved during the study moved into aged care, and depression scores went up for reasons that have nothing to do with trees.)

Professor Henry Brodaty AO, this year's Senior Australian of the Year, spoke at Reshaping the Future of Ageing in Adelaide last Wednesday. One statistic from the talk: of people who die with enough pathology in the brain to warrant a dementia diagnosis, about half were functioning normally beforehand. Past 80, he said, almost nobody's brain is clean. The gap between the pathology and the diagnosis is cognitive resilience.

His case for building it is Maintaining Your Brain, a trial of about 6,000 people aged 65 to 77 in New South Wales. Half received publicly available information, half received online coaching across physical activity, brain training, a Mediterranean diet, and treatment for depression and anxiety. Over three years both groups improved, and the coached group improved close to three times as much. The cost-benefit analysis came out ahead, on fewer hospital and emergency presentations.

He's using the award to push for a national brain health promotion program. He said that “it's never too late and never too early”.

From the proteins in a single blood sample, researchers have built separate age estimates for ten organs — brain, heart, liver, kidney, lung and the immune system among them — across about 44,000 UK Biobank participants, then checked them against cohorts in China and the United States. Within one person, the organs come out years apart. Brain age was the strongest single predictor of death.

Each week, I review developments in ageing and aged care and what they mean in practice. If this was useful, forward it to someone in the sector who'd appreciate it.

George Gouzounis