Tag: Geriatrics

Caregivers & Technology: What They Want and Need

Click the italicized text to view the report: Caregivers & Technology: What They Want and Need from Longevity Network   [Below; slides from the linked report]  

Family caregiver balancing act.

In a survey conducted by Home Instead, Inc., franchisor of the Home Instead Senior Care® network, 26 percent of North American family caregivers of older adults report that they felt a "workplace stigma" associated with elder caregiving. These 10 ways to feel more empowered at work could help give family caregivers hope for better balance and health: 1. … Continue reading Family caregiver balancing act.

Do you want to know how long you’ll live?

"If you're coming down with a bad case of Age Anxiety, here's some good news. Seventy-five percent of human aging can be self-regulated. But what exactly does one regulate? Granted, heredity plays a key role. But at least six lifestyle factors also regulate aging." 

Better to forget?

I spoke with Blake Richards, one of the co-authors of the paper, who applies artificial intelligence theories to his study of how the brain learns. He says that in the AI world, there's something called over-fitting — a phenomenon in which a machine stores too much information, hindering its ability to behave intelligently. He hopes … Continue reading Better to forget?

Our Parents Health Care Needs: The Aspen Ideas Festival

By Richard Eisenberg  . June 27, 2017 Part of the TRANSFORMING LIFE AS WE AGE SPECIAL REPORT You’ve likely heard how the Republicans’ Obamacare legislation might have profound effects on older Americans. Health insurance premiums could be up to five times higher than those of younger people (up from three times today), for instance. The Urban Institute estimates … Continue reading Our Parents Health Care Needs: The Aspen Ideas Festival

Nutrition in healthy aging

The significant increase in average life expectancy is one of society’s great achievements which has been associated with a shift in the leading causes of illnesses from infectious to noncommunicable diseases.  It is well known that the percentage of populations categorized as elderly (e.g. 65 years and older) will increase dramatically in almost every country … Continue reading Nutrition in healthy aging

Do we have a moral obligation as a society to ensure that genetic engineering is pursued, or should we do everything possible to ensure that we do not open this Pandora’s box?

International Ethics Project

More recently, the human race stands at a threshold like never before. The human race now has the tools to restruct its own hereditary capacities (Kevles, 2016).The enhancement of human beings has materialized into an ever expanding topic in recent years. As science and technology continues to develop, people are beginning to realize that some of the basic factors in the human race may be altered with, in the future. The human condition could be altered with through the improvement of basic human abilities (Bostrom & Roache, 2008). Genetic Engineering can be defined as the intentional manipulation of genetic material so as to attain an intended and desired result. The process of Genetic Engineering employs various molecular techniques to manipulate the genetic material of cells and/or organisms to alter hereditary traits or produce biological products (Kumar & Sahal, 2014). This post looks at various considerations relating to genetic engineering.

Life extension

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Your Pets Are Living Longer Too. But Geriatric Cats?

We don’t really have much of an idea what healthy aging looks like in a cat. Which, in turn, means we don’t really know the best way to care for our feline pals late in life.

Older; With Bipolar

Young’s longstanding research interest is in optimizing the use of medicine for treatment of older people with severe mood disorders. While less is known about milder forms, severe bipolar disorder in elder adults seems to fall into three categories. He defines below.

Gene Testing and Long-Term Care Insurance

Approximately 5.5 million Americans have Alzheimer’s disease, making up half of all nursing home residents, but very few people have been tested for it's specific gene. Last month, however, the gene testing company 23andMe started offering tests that reveal whether people carry the gene, while assessing their risks for developing certain conditions. Following the wave, … Continue reading Gene Testing and Long-Term Care Insurance

Your Spit Holds a Clue to Brain Health

Your spit may hold a clue to future brain health. Investigators at the Beaumont Research Institute, part of Beaumont Health in Michigan, are hopeful that their study involving small molecules in saliva will help identify those at risk of developing Alzheimer's disease -- a neurologic condition predicted to reach epidemic proportions worldwide by 2050. Given … Continue reading Your Spit Holds a Clue to Brain Health

Getting Lost May Indicate Alzheimer’s

Losing your navigational skills or getting lost even though you are in a familiar setting may provide some of the first indications that Alzheimer’s disease could affect you in later life. This is a preliminary discovery of a remarkable long-term study being carried out by scientists who are searching to uncover how dementia first affects the brain. The Prevent project – based at Edinburgh University, though it involves several other UK research centres – is intended to detect signs of Alzheimer’s in people while they are still relatively young. Usually, the disease does not show its symptoms until individuals are in their 60s, by which time it has already done profound damage to the brain.

Death After Life? Reports of brain activity after clinical death.

When the Canadian team looked for this phenomenon in their human patients, they came up empty. “We did not observe a delta wave within 1 minute following cardiac arrest in any of our four patients,” they report. If all of this feels frustratingly inconsequential, welcome to the strange and incredibly niche field of necroneuroscience, where no one really knows what’s actually going on. But what we do know is that very strange things can happen at the moment of death – and afterwards – with a pair of studies from 2016 finding that more than 1,000 genes were still functioning several days after death in human cadavers.