Unlike fat parked on the hips and thighs, fat around the middle produces substances that can create serious health risks.

No matter what your body shape, excess fat isn't good for your health. But saddlebags and ballooning bellies are not equivalent. When it comes to body fat, location counts, and each year brings new evidence that the fat lying deep within the abdomen is more perilous than the fat you can pinch with your fingers.

In most people, about 90% of body fat is subcutaneous, the kind that lies in a layer just beneath the skin. If you poke your ...

Advance care directives allow you to make your health care wishes known at a time when you are unable to speak for yourself.

Most of us value our ability and freedom to make choices, especially about medical treatment. But what if you lose the capacity to make decisions or let your wishes be known? How will clinicians know what treatments you want, or don't want? Who would communicate your wishes to them?

The danger is that important medical decisions will be left to a physician who is unaware of your values, beliefs, or preferences, or to a relative who doesn't ...

Poor vision increases the risk of falling, and wearing glasses helps reduce that risk — usually, but not always. If you wear multifocal lenses — that is, bifocals, trifocals, or progressive lenses — you've probably had occasional trouble negotiating steps, curbs, or uneven ground. Scientists investigating this problem think they know why: when we walk, we normally see the ground from a distance of five to six feet, but the focal length of the lower segment of multifocal lenses is only slightly more than one foot. Consequently, our view of the ground is blurry. Depth perception as well as contrast ...

With age, we inevitably develop more wrinkles, aches and pains, and more problems of all kinds with our bodies. But these unwelcome changes don't seem to get us down. People over age 50 are apparently happier and less stressed: we worry less and feel increasingly better about our lives, even into old age. These are the findings of a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (online, May 17, 2010) that investigated age-related changes in two different aspects of well-being: overall satisfaction with life (global well-being) and day-to-day experiences of certain emotions (hedonic well-being). Though both ...

Q. I'm 79 and had chickenpox as a child. Should I get the shingles vaccine? What are the risks?

A. The U.S. Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) recommends the shingles vaccine for most people ages 60 and over, regardless of whether they recall having had the chickenpox or not. (Studies show that 99% of people over age 40 have had chickenpox.) Shingles, also called herpes zoster, or zoster, is a painful blistering rash caused by the same virus that causes chickenpox — the varicella zoster virus (VZV). After you recover from chickenpox, VZV retreats to nerve cells near the ...