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Loss Of Balance Is Leading Cause Of Elderly Falls
Accidental falls are one of the leading causes of injury death in people over 65 worldwide, but for a long time researchers have struggled to understand just how they happen.
What they do know is that many older patients have cognitive impairment, and even the most conscientious medical staff can have trouble remembering details of a fall. So a group of researchers in British Columbia decided to use a round-the-clock video in a long-term care facility to observe accidental falls right as they happen.
Their study, published in the The Lancet, found that most of the 227 falls caught on video happened because the patients lost their balance, not because they slipped or tripped.
But what causes this momentary loss of balance?
One simple explanation could be the lack of walkers or wheelchairs, says Stephen Robinovitch, professor of biomedical physiology and kinesiology at Simon Fraser University and lead author on the study. Though 75 percent of patients reported using a walker or a wheelchair to get around, only 20 percent were using one when they fell, he says.
Full story of elderly falls at NPR News
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9 million elderly at risk of empty pantries
About twice a week, when the arthritis in her legs allows it, Judy Slover rises in her one-bedroom apartment at the Rug Mill Towers in Freehold and makes the six-block trek on foot to the food pantry here, Freehold Area Open Door.Sometimes the walk takes a half-hour, sometimes more, all depending on how much pain she feels, she says.
At Open Door, she picks up bread and pasta, apples and oranges, onions and potatoes, maybe some frozen chicken and hamburger; thanks the volunteers; then journeys home. Some days, she can't make the trip at all, says Slover, 60, who also copes with diabetes and depression.
"I've been homeless," she said. "I have no support team. They call me the bag lady, but I gotta do what I gotta do, you know? Nobody's been there for me but Open Door."
Slover is among about 9 million people 50 and older living at risk of going hungry every day, a 79% increase in a decade, according to the AARP.
Full story of elderly health at USA Today
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Tricks From the Elderly to Stop Worrying
Recent research into how emotions change with age may be able to help people lead healthier and longer lives and bring about new treatments for depression in the elderly.
Like people's bodies, emotions change over time. Older people for the most part have far fewer negative feelings, such as worry and stress, than do younger people, studies show.
The elderly learn to disentangle themselves from feelings of negativity and seem to focus more on present situations that bring pleasure, rather than on the future, researchers say. They also tend to process negative information less deeply than positive information.
By contrast, positive feelings such as enjoyment and happiness change very little from the time a person is in his youth until old age.
"It seems to be essential for our emotional well-being to not look back in anger and to focus on the positive when we are older," Stefanie Brassen, a researcher at the University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf, said in an email.
Full story of elderly tips at The Wall Street Journal
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More Older People Treated for Depression
Anna Hill’s mother-in-law had suffered from depression for years, it was clear in hindsight, and had denied it for years, too. Only 73, she’d lost interest in doing much of anything. In chronic pain after an earlier accident, she was taking high doses of methadone. Last November, she stunned her family by declining, at the eleventh hour, to come to Thanksgiving dinner.
“I’d only seen her in a nightgown for a year straight,” said Ms. Hill, 42, an accountant in Atlanta. “She was just rotting away in bed, watching TV and taking methadone.”
Depression in the elderly is a mixed picture these days.
For years, mental health specialists lamented that depression was seriously underdiagnosed and undertreated in the elderly. Laypeople saw it not as a disease but as an inevitable part of aging. Doctors missed it because depression didn’t always look the way it did in younger patients — less sadness and weepiness, more physical symptoms and disengagement. Older people themselves often rejected help because mental illness carried a stigma.
Full story of older people with depression at The New York Times
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The Pharmacology of Aging
Within the next two decades, the number of people aged 65 and older will double in the United States. Aging is a complex physiological process that can affect how bodies process and respond to medication, and clinical data increasingly suggest that when it comes to prescribing, one drug regimen does not fit patients of all ages. Older individuals have the highest disease burden and are prescribed the most medications, yet they are often left out of standard-setting clinical trials that put drugs on the market. At The Pharmacology of Aging: Why Age Matters symposium, presented by the Biochemical Pharmacology Discussion Group and the New York Chapter of the American Chemical Society, representatives from industry, government, and research communities met to discuss how to improve drug development strategies to better serve the geriatric population.
Seongeun Cho from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration introduced the day's topic by pointing out that clinical drug trials typically recruit relatively young, adult patients. We know that aging matters for drug response, but there is still much to learn concerning the mechanisms of how it matters. The day's symposium sought to open a dialogue about how to deliver patient-centric drug development for the elderly.
Full story of pharmacology of aging at The New York Academy of Sciences
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Geriatric Patients Show Greater Cognitive Decline after Hospitalization
A new report that suggests cognitive function tends to decline substantially when older patients are admitted to the hospital could be an opportunity for hospitalists to be proactive in developing interventional therapies to combat the deterioration.
"Cognitive Decline after Hospitalization in a Community Population of Older Persons," published last month in Neurology, found that patients' global cognitive score declined a mean of 0.031 units per year before the first hospitalization, compared with 0.075 units per year thereafter, a more-than-twofold increase. Similar declines were seen in episodic memory (a 3.3-fold increase post-hospitalization) and executive function (a 1.7-fold increase post-hospitalization), according to the survey. More severe illness, longer hospital stay, and older age were associated with even faster cognitive decline after hospitalization.
Keeping seniors healthy a matter of education
MORONGO BASIN — Senior citizens are the fastest growing demographic, de-clares Registered Dietitian Debra Shea-Ohlfs of Twentynine Palms.
“As the boomers continue to age, those aged 65 to 75 will soon make up 20 percent of the population,” the dietitian observes. “More and more, people will be concerned about senior nutrition, because it’s not uncommon for older adults to lose interest in meal planning and cooking.”
Do you know a senior who makes a meal of tea and toast?
Often seniors have high blood pressure and find typical low-sodium food to be bland, Ohlfs explains.
Sometimes seniors lose their sense of taste and smell due to medications, and that can lead to loss of appetite.
Other seniors have chewing difficulty because of their teeth or dentures, and since saliva decreases with aging, they also have trouble swallowing.
Eating Berries May Help Prevent Age-Related Memory Loss
By Jennifer Warner
Making berries a part of your daily diet may help keep your memory sharp, a new review shows.
The review shows there’s strong evidence that eating berries boosts brain function and may prevent age-related memory loss.
“In addition to their now well-known antioxidant effects, dietary supplementation with berry fruits has direct effects on the brain,” writes researcher Marshall Miller, of the USDA-ARS Human Nutrition Research Center on Aging, and colleagues in the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry.
Researchers say laboratory and animal studies suggest that eating berries has beneficial effects on brain signaling pathways involved in inflammation and cell death. The net effect of these improvements in brain function may stall age-related brain disorders like Alzheimer’s disease and dementia.
If nurses seem anything less than compassionate towards the elderly, it’s because they’re overworked and bogged down by paperwork
By Dominique Jackson
“Were you a miner, then, me duck?” The nurse, looked up from the clipboard in her hand and fairly bellowed at Dad, “Mr Jackson, is it? You don’t mind if I call you Fred, do you now, love?”
“I don’t mind if you call me Fred but there is no need to shout at me, now is there, duck?” My father replied with equanimity and with his usual beaming smile.
She was one of the nicer nurses we encountered during the three years my father spent yo-yoing in and out of the various and very varied hospitals of the Mid Yorkshire NHS Trust, before he finally died at the end of 2008.
Yet to be fair, the overwhelming majority of the staff we had dealings with throughout that fraught and stressful period were, indeed, doing their best, often under significant pressure, frequently apparently hide-bound by paperwork and, in some cases, working in frankly antiquated and far from ideally hygienic conditions.
Full story of the nursing relationship with the elderly at Daily Mail
Integrative medicine successfully treats chronic pain (maybe)
By Karen M. Cheung
As controversial as integrative medicine is, a new study indicates that complementary treatments like yoga and massages can treat chronic pain and other conditions successfully, according to a report from philanthropist community Bravewell Collaborative released yesterday.
Integrative medicine, by definition, is patient-centered care, addressing physician, emotional, mental, social, spiritual and environmental influences on a person's health, according to the report. It can include food and nutrition, supplements, yoga, meditation, traditional Chinese medicine and acupuncture, massage and pharmaceuticals, and any combination of those things.
The survey included 29 integrative medicine centers, including Cleveland Clinic, Mayo Clinic and Stanford University, and asked about integrative medicine results for adult, geriatric, adolescent, obstetric-gynecologic, pediatric and end-of-life care. The survey respondents reported that they had the most clinical success in chronic pain (75 percent), gastrointestinal disorders (59 percent), depression and anxiety (55 percent), cancer (52 percent) and stress (52 percent).