When Access Hollywood interviewed 104-year-old Edythe Kirchmaier, we were impressed by her vigor and dedication to Direct Relief International, but we also noticed something else. Kirchmaier, who seems young and vibrant despite her age, had a wavering, breathy voice. This caused us to wonder: What happens to our voices as we age?

“Voice can depend on general health. In general, we start seeing aging problems at age 65,” says Claudio Milstein, associate professor of surgery at Cleveland Clinic Lerner College of Medicine. “The typical change as we get older, is that we get thin, breathy voices … [and] those are the characteristics that make it sound like a person has an old voice.”

Evidence confirms that voices do change with age. The vocal chords should vibrate between 90 and 230 times per minute, with young people experiencing the most movement and older people experiencing the least, explains Amee Shah, associate professor and director of the Research Laboratory in Speech Acoustics and Perception at Cleveland State University.

“In my lab we look at acoustic data because perception can be misleading and the hard numbers confirm it. It is true that as we age our voices change,” says Shah.

When we age our vocal chords weaken and become drier. Our respiratory systems and torsos change, too, with our lungs and chest cavities becoming more rigid, while our spines curve, causing us to stoop over (for some a little, others a lot). Weakened and dry vocal chords become stringy, which prevent normal vibration, causing higher pitched voices that sound thin. And the transformations in the respiratory system and chest mean we have less power behind our voices. Even the joints in our vocal chords can become arthritic, contributing to problems. 

“The vocal folds are made up of muscle and collagen among other things. Just like other muscles thin out or atrophy, the vocal folds do as well,” says Gina Vess, a speech pathologist and director of the Clinical Voice Programs at Duke University Medical Center.

Not everyone suffers from wavering voices as they age. People who are physically and socially active possess stronger voices and those who sing maintain robust voices throughout their lives. 

People who suffer from weakened, breathy voices often become ashamed of how they sound and cringe when asked to repeat themselves over and over. These people then avoid socialization, leading to less vocal exercising. And, they feel more isolated, which leads to depression and a lessened quality of life. 

“It doesn’t mean there is no hope if they notice a weakening. A lot of times nonsurgical treatments [improve voices],” says Vess.

Those suffering from wavering voices should visit an ear, noses, and throat doctor and seek help at a voice clinic. Experts recommend speech therapy first, with more serious treatments such as injections or surgery if therapy fails.  

“Voices carry something about the emotional state and health of the body,” says Milstein. “There are a lot of things we can do to rejuvenate a voice even though it may be part of the normal aging process.”

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Stas Volik /Featurepics.com

Stress and a lack of sleep can cause a lack of melanin, causing that haggard, jaundiced look.

It’s almost midnight and you’re stuck in a tangle of wrapping paper and ribbon while cookies burn in the oven. You're exhausted but your holiday to-do list keeps you up and working.

After a few hours of fitful sleep, you stumble into the bathroom and gaze in the mirror. Your skin is sallow and the bags under your eyes make you look as if you went five rounds with a prizefighter.

What is it about lack of sleep and stress that makes us look so ragged?

“Stress causes a drop in the skin’s ability to protect itself,” explains Dr. Amit Sood, associate professor of medicine and chair of the Mind Body Initiative at Mayo Clinic. “All of this happens with chronic stress -- if you do not have healthy collagen in your skin, you would have baggy sort of skin under your eyes.”

And stress can also lead to less melanin, causing that jaundiced, haggard look. Melanin pigments the skin, giving humans their complexion.

According to Sood, author of Train Your Brain, Engage Your Heart, Transform Your Life: A Course in Attention and Interpretation Therapy, we're at war with ourselves whenever we're stressed.

“You lose efficiency; your sleep is not as restful; you eat more, you gain weight; your relationships are affected,” he says.

As a result, our faces look, well, uglier. And puffier. But where does the puff come from?

Dark circles and bags appear when the body is unable to rejuvenate at night due to lack of sleep, says anesthesiologist, internist and bestselling author Dr. Michael Roizen, who compares puffy eyes to swollen ankles.

As we go through the day, we sometimes accumulate water in our bodies instead of passing it (as urine). The excessive water pools beneath the eyes, giving those telltale dark, puffy circles. If we don’t get enough sleep -- on our backs or sides -- our skin does not have the chance to refresh itself and tighten up.

"Normally when you sleep, you distribute water in the body," says Roizen, chair of the Wellness Institute at the Cleveland Clinic. Not sleeping causes us to accumulate water under our eyes, giving us that extra "baggage".

Roizen agrees with Sood that experiencing a lot of stress leads to lack of sleep -- and this can become a dangerous cycle. But stress does more than make people look weird.   

“What you get from stress is the wrinkles of aging,” says Roizen, who co-authored several bestsellers with Dr. Mehmet Oz, including YOU: Being Beautiful: The Owner’s Manual to Inner and Outer Beauty. “Stress causes you to age.”

Roizen also notes that stress not only causes wrinkles on the face but wrinkles in your arteries, as well, which can cause serious problems at an earlier age.

And the aging effect doesn't stop there.

“Your cells are biologically 10 to 15 years older … if you are chronically stressed," says Sood. "If you are 45, the cells signal as if they are 60 years old."

Both believe that reducing stress can enhance physical appearance and improve health.

“Stress and joy are two sides of the same coin,” advises Sood. “Engage with life and find meaning in it.” 

Want more weird health news? Find The Body Odd on Facebook.

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Scientists have long assumed that fading memories are just a normal part of aging. But a new study suggests that certain 80-somethings can remember every bit as well as people much younger.

Researchers from Northwestern University found that these mentally sharp octogenarians, dubbed SuperAgers, also have brains that look very much like those of people in middle-age, according to the study published in the Journal of International Neuropsychological Society.

For the new study, researchers used MRIs to look at the thickness of the outer layer of the brain, a region called the cortex, in SuperAgers, normally aging 80-somethings, and healthy 50- to 65-year-olds.

What they found was intriguing – the SuperAgers had brains that looked very much like those of the younger people in the study and in some ways looked even healthier. 

"We were very surprised at that," says study co-author Emily Rogalski, an assistant research professor at the cognitive neurology and Alzheimer's disease center at the Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine

"When we looked at cortical thickness, we were very shocked to see that even with a 20- to 30-year age gap, there was seemingly no difference in the cortical thickness," she says. "In normally aging 80-year-olds, you see quite a bit of cortical thinning, even among those who are still performing normally for their age."

The cortex is key since it's involved in memory, attention, and complex thinking, also known as executive function.

Rogalski and her colleagues tested the memories and cognitive skills of 12 Chicago-area SuperAgers and 14 middle-aged volunteers. They then scanned all 26 with a 3D MRI machine and compared both groups of scans to images from normally aging 80-somethings that came from a national data bank.

Finding a group of SuperAgers was no easy task, however.

While plenty of 80-somethings showed up at the lab saying their memories were great, most didn’t remember as well as healthy middle-aged people do.

"We weren't even sure if we would be able to find any SuperAgers since we set the bar so high," says Rogalski. "They had to be as good as 50- to 65-year olds. We screened 300 people who thought they had good memories and found 30 SuperAgers."

And the MRIs showed why the 30 SuperAgers were so mentally sharp.

Rogalski found the SuperAgers' cortexes were as thick as those in people 20 to 30 years younger.

Experts believe that shrinking cortexes are a sign that cells are shriveling and dying with age - sometimes killed off by the same abnormal proteins as you see in Alzheimer's brains. One finding that really surprised Rogalski and her colleagues: a region deep in the brain, called the anterior cingulate was actually larger in SuperAgers than it was in middle-aged folks.

The anterior cingulate is very important for attention. Studies have shown that one of the reasons memory fails as we age is that we can't focus as well as we did when we were younger.

"If I were to tell you ten things you need to pick up at the grocery store and then the phone rang and you got distracted talking to your best friend you'd probably find it hard to remember those ten things when you got to the store," Rogalski explains. "That wouldn't mean your memory was bad, but rather, that you weren't able to focus on the task."

Rogalski hopes the new research on SuperAgers may help scientists unlock the secrets of these "youthful brains" and find ways to protect us against from age-related damage.

"This is the first step in a new way of looking at this - a road less traveled in aging research," she says. "Instead of looking at what is going wrong with the brain, we want to know what is going right."

As for why some people are SuperAgers and some aren't, the research team can't provide any answers at this point. It could be all related to genetics or a combination of genes and the environment: no clues popped up during the SuperAger's interviews that set them apart from people who had aged normally.

But the question of whether there's something we can do to keep mentally sharp is something Rogalski is hoping she'll be able to answer as she continues to study the SuperAger phenomenon.

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• Seniors say they sleep better than young adults
• Real 'Benjamin Button'? Stem cells reverse aging in mice

Having wrinkles adds well, a new wrinkle for young people trying to gauge the emotions seen on older people's faces. A new study suggests that younger people may make more mistakes when judging the emotions of older folks.

To younger adults, age-related changes, such as wrinkles and folds, look like facial expressions, so they may interfere with the perception of emotion in an older face and perhaps convey the wrong message.

In the study, published online in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, researchers asked 65 college students to view computer-generated black and white faces. They viewed faces of three men and three women who were young (ages 19 to 21) or old (ages 76 to 83) displaying one of four facial expressions: neutral, happy, sad, or angry.

Participants were asked to rate the emotional expression on the person's face on a scale from 1 for "not at all intense" to 7 for "very intense."

Young people were were most accurate in recognizing an angry expression and least accurate in judging sadness in old faces. They perceived happy faces in older people as showing less overall emotion than a younger person.

The study found that a facial expression, such as pure anger, on an older face is perceived differently -- and less clearly -- than the very same expression displayed on a younger person.

"In the case of the older expresser, the anger is seen as mixed with other emotions,"  says lead author Dr. Ursula Hess, a professor of psychology at Humboldt-University in Berlin, Germany.  "Clearly it makes a difference whether you think someone is just angry or someone is both angry and sad," she adds.

Even when it came to a neutral face, volunteers perceived that there was more emotion in a neutral older face than in a younger one.

Courtesy of Dr. Ursula Hess

Here's an example of the images researchers used in the study.

Researchers suggest that wrinkles do impact the communication of emotion.

"We may make mistakes when judging the emotions of the elderly," says Hess. "This may result in less harmonious interactions."

The age of the observers also likely made a difference in the results. Had the study participants been closer in age to the older faces, they would have had more experience at recognizing older faces to overcome the difficulties posed by a less clear emotional signal, Hess explains.

Although Botox may help smooth out the furrows and lines of an older face, it won't make it any easier for people to gauge your emotions. The cosmetic injections may limit facial expressions, making them harder to read.

So how can an older person make their emotions more visible -- and less obscure -- to other people?

Emotions are usually transmitted via a number of channels, including voice and posture, as well as the face, suggests Hess. And during everyday interactions, expressions are more dynamic than looking at a black-and-white photograph in a lab.

Since there are many different sources of emotion information, "an attentive interaction partner could learn how to properly decode the emotion," says Hess. That's probably why older people are better at decoding other older people's expressions.

Related:

• Is 'old person smell' real? Yes, but it's not what you think
• Happy deathday? You're more likely to die on your birthday
• What 25 years of driving a truck can do to your skin

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Besides the cards, cake, candles, and gifts, there might be one more unexpected surprise in store for you on your birthday -- a higher risk of dying.

A new study suggests that men and women are 14 percent more likely to die on their birthday than any other day of the year.  This effect was strongest in people aged 60 and older, who were up to 18 percent more likely to die on their birthday.

"We find more deaths than expected solely on birthdays, that is neither in the days before nor after the birthdays," says lead author Dr. Vladeta Ajdacic-Gross, an epidemiologist for the Institute of Social and Preventive Medicine at the University of Zurich.

In this large study, which was published in the Annals of Epidemiology, researchers analyzed data from more than 2.4 million Swiss people who died between 1969 and 2008. They tried to determine if there was any relationship between when people died and the cause compared to their birthdays.

"We were surprised that our findings apply to specific causes of death," says Ajdacic-Gross. Both violent causes, such as suicides and falls, as well as strokes and cardiovascular deaths were tied to birthdays. "In addition, older people are distinctly more vulnerable than younger people," he adds.

Men were more likely to have a violent demise on their birthday, as their chances of suicides spiked by nearly 35 percent and their odds of being accident victims rose by almost 29 percent. Deadly falls in men rose by 44 percent on their birthdays, and, interestingly, the number of falls started to increase about four days before the celebration took place.

When it came to natural causes of deaths, women were at greater risk -- almost 22 percent -- of passing away from a stroke on their birthday. For both ladies and gentleman, there was a nearly 19 percent increase in dying from heart-related reasons.

Scientists also unexpectedly found the risk of dying from cancer jumps by 10.8 percent on birthdays. Cancer deaths also seemed to be higher than usual in the days immediately following a birthday -- a trend not seen for any other cause of death. 

But the question you may be asking is: Why? Is birthday partying to blame? Is it a psychological let-down to realize you're one year older -- and not getting any younger?

"We can only speculate on the reasons for the extra deaths on birthdays," points out Ajdacic-Gross. They suspect that birthday-related stress in older people may play a part in the jump in stroke and cardiac deaths.

Other studies have suggested that alcohol may be a reason behind the spike in suicides and perhaps even falls.

The Swiss researchers say their results support the theory of an "anniversary reaction" or "birthday blues," meaning that deaths occurred more frequently on a birthday. They suggest this is a more likely explanation than the "death postponement" hypothesis, or that deaths are less likely to take place on birthdays and people might hang on long enough to reach this yearly milestone -- or to see through certain holidays or special occasions.

Some famous people who have passed away on their birthday include the actress Ingrid Bergman, feminist Betty Friedan, and William Shakespeare. 

More from The Body Odd:

• Some insomniacs may just be afraid of the dark
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Courtesy of the New England Journal of Medicine

While "tan mom" Patricia Krentcil’s skin illustrates what happens when a person chronically fake bakes, accidental exposure to sunlight can cause as many wrinkles without a person even being aware of it.

An unnamed 69-year-old man visited doctors at Northwestern University and with wrinkles etched into the left side of his face -- the lines are so deep that the left side looks as if it belongs to a man 20 years older, while the right side seems age-appropriate. The startling image appears in a recent issue of the New England Journal of Medicine. 

The man worked as a delivery truck driver for 25 years, and over time, the UVA rays shining through the truck window caused severe wrinkling and over-aging. UVA rays, or long wave ultraviolet rays, account for about 95 percent of the UV radiation reaching the Earth from the sun, according to the Skin Cancer Foundation. UVB rays, or short-wave ultraviolet radiation, cause the red blistering of sunburn, and though these rays do not penetrate as deeply as UVA rays, they contribute to the development of skin cancers.

Physicians call these deep lines caused by overexposure to UV rays dermatoheliosis, though most people know it as photoaging, the wrinkling and cracking of skin caused by too much time in the sun (or the tanning bed). During the 25 years the man drove his truck, the UVA rays hitting his skin damaged the epidermis and upper layers of his dermis, where collagen is. Collagen helps make the skin elastic and prevents such crevasses. 

Repeated exposure to UVA rays also thickens the stratum corneum, the outermost layer of the epidermis, which protects the body from infection, chemicals, and environmental stresses. This toughening is the body’s way of attempting to protect itself from sun damage.

The physicians, Dr. Jennifer R.S. Gordon and Dr. Joaquin C. Brieva of Northwestern University, note that the driver most likely was exposed to UVA rays, which are less likely to cause cancer than UVB, but do play a role in skin cancers.

"I see photoaging and photodamage every day in clinic, but not so starkly demarcated," Gordon said via email. "Otherwise we typically see symmetric damage. Interestingly, there are some differences in which side of the body skin cancers occur more often on that some people think are attributed to driving habits because they vary based on country, gender, passenger/driver, etc."

The doctors recommended treatment for the driver that involves monitoring him for the development of cancer and prescribing a topical retinoid, which may erase some of the damage. Most people can easily prevent photoaging by slathering on the sunscreen and wearing protective clothing and hats (even if you think you’ll be shaded).

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No matter how much you try to hide your age, you can’t nip-and-tuck your scent away. People will still be able to figure out how old you are simply by taking a sniff.

Researchers have determined that there really is an “old person smell” -- and a young person smell and a middle-aged smell -- according to a study published Wednesday in PLoS ONE.

“This study shows you can’t fake it,” says study co-author Johan Lundstrom, an assistant professor at the Monell Chemical Senses Center and at Sweden’s Karolinska Institute. “If you walk around a corner, you don’t have to look at someone to know they’re older; you can just sniff them out.”

At a time when we spray, spritz and anxiously try to scrub away and cover up our natural body odor, the new research should be reassuring to our noses. But our paranoia that we turn into pungent, musty moth balls as we age turns out to be completely wrong. Older people, in fact, have less intense -- and more pleasant -- scents than their younger counterparts, the new research indicates.

Scientists have long known that our bodies give off scents that contain a variety of chemicals and that those chemicals can convey a lot of information. But they didn’t know whether body odor changed with age in an easily detectable way. 

Though this is the first study to document that an “old person smell” exists, it’s recognized in many cultures around the world. The Japanese, in fact, have a special word to describe how old people smell: Kareishu.

Earlier studies in animals showed that body odor changes with age, Lundstrom says. He wondered whether that might be true for people, too.

To see if people could accurately identify a person’s age through smell, Lundstrom and his colleagues asked 41 volunteers to wear a special T-shirt to bed for five nights, after bathing and washing their hair with unscented products.

Each of the unscented shirts contained underarm pads which, by the end of five days, were steeped in the volunteer’s body odor.

Pieces of the pads were then dropped into glass jars, which were grouped by age: Some jars contained scents of 20- to 30-year-olds, some the scents of 45- to 55-year-olds, and some the scents of 75- to 95-year-olds.

The researchers then rounded up another 41 volunteers and had them sniff the jars. The volunteers were then asked to guess the age group associated with the scent in each jar and to rate the intensity of each scent and its pleasantness.

The volunteers were pretty good at figuring out the ages -- better than would be predicted by chance. But they were even more accurate when they were simply asked to group together all the jars that smelled like old people. Which means that they could detect the old person smell the best.

Intriguingly, the volunteers scored old people’s odors highest for pleasantness and lowest for intensity.

Lundstrom doesn’t know why our scents change with age. But he’s got a theory that it’s got to do with reproduction.

Other studies have shown that people often choose mates that are unlike them genetically. In fact, those who marry third cousins, have the highest reproductive success, Lundstrom says. And it’s by smell that we determine how closely related we are to the person sitting next to us, even if we’re unconscious of it.

Similarly, Lundstrom suspects that some women might seek out older men because they’ve proven that they’ve got longevity genes.

“We favor the older individuals because they are survivors,” he explains. “Of course, when that developed many thousands of years ago, we didn’t get that old. So, it’s not like we’re favoring 80 year-olds.”

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The more outgoing and optimistic you are, the longer you may live, a new study suggests. Researchers have found that personality traits like being outgoing, optimistic, easygoing, and  enjoying laughter as well as staying engaged in activities may be an important part of the longevity genes mix.

"When I started working with centenarians, I thought we'd find that they survived so long in part because they were mean and ornery," study researcher Nir Barzilai, of the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, said in a statement. "But when we assessed the personalities of these 243 centenarians, we found qualities that clearly reflect a positive attitude towards life."

The study is a part of the Albert Einstein College of Medicine's Longevity Genes Project, which includes more than 500 Ashkenazi Jews ages 95 and older, and 700 of their kids. This small subset of Eastern European Jews is genetically very similar to each other. In addition, some members of the population are extremely long-lived, so it's easy to compare their genes to the genetics of members of the population who don't fall into that category. [ 7 Ways the Mind & Body Change With Age ]

By analyzing the genes of these people, researchers are discovering why some of them live so long, and others don't.

Previous studies of this population have found other genetic reasons for their longevity, including genes related to cellular repair mechanisms. Another study found that these centenarians don't necessarily behave any better than the general population when it comes to health habits: They smoke, drink and eat just as badly as the rest of us.

So why look at personality? A person's level of shyness or how open they are to new experiences, say, arise from underlying genetic mechanisms, which may also affect health, the researchers said. So Barzilai and colleagues developed a brief measure of personality, which they gave to 243 of the centenarians in the study (average age 97.6 years, 75 percent women).

"Most were outgoing, optimistic and easygoing," Barzilai said of the centenarians. "They considered laughter an important part of life and had a large social network. They expressed emotions openly rather than bottling them up."

In addition, the centenarians had lower scores for displaying neurotic personality and higher scores for being conscientious compared with a representative sample of the U.S. population.

"Some evidence indicates that personality can change between the ages of 70 and 100, so we don't know whether our centenarians have maintained their personality traits across their entire life spans," Barzilai said. "Nevertheless, our findings suggest that centenarians share particular personality traits and that genetically based aspects of personality may play an important role in achieving both good health and exceptional longevity."

The results were published May 21 in the journal Aging.

More from LiveScience:

• Extending Life: 7 Ways to Live Past 100
• 5 Ways Your Cells Deal With Stress
• 7 Things That Will Make You Happy 

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• Why do we twitch as we're falling asleep?
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