Gayle Doll: Expert in Washington Post story on fitness, aging
Tuesday, September 2nd, 2008
Gayle Doll was the primary expert in a recent Washington Post story about physical fitness in senior citizens.
Doll is an assistant professor in gerontology and director of the Center on Aging.
The story focused on two D. C. area brothers - ages 87 and 89 - training to be top swimmers at the Summer National Senior Games in August 2009 in San Francisco.
“To those who study aging populations, the Tatum brothers’ remarkable strength and agility, or the idea of a 90-year-old competitive athlete, especially someone who has been active his entire life, syncs perfectly with a wide body of research,” Lonnae O’Neal Parker wrote in the Post.
The research cited included Doll’s.
The article continued: “Commercials, movies and television shows often feature the elderly as incontinent, grumpy, content to sit in armchairs clutching remotes, tuned into television for hours; mentally slack with all the meaning in their lives already behind them. ‘If we have images of what we should be at 89, then we start to act and function like what society tells us we should be doing,’ Doll says.
“With decades of scientific evidence, it would seem an easy thing to convince older Americans to exercise, but according to Doll, the social stereotype of aging is one of the hardest barriers to overcome.”
The entire story can be read on The Washington Post web site.
This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 2nd, 2008 and is filed under Dean's Blog.