Swine Flu Resources

Information on Swine Flu from the National Library of Medicine's MedlinePlus, a trustworthy source of health information.

http://www.webmd.com/cold-and-flu/flu-guide/20061101/swine-flu-faq?src=RSS_PUBLIC

Free CareFinder Guide from the Alzheimer's Association

New from the Alzheimer's Association, this free guide helps people living with Alzheimer's and caregivers make informed choices when selecting a care provider for home-based or residential care.

A tear-out chart in the back lists summaries of the most common types of care and helps you evaluate your options.

You must fill out a form to receive the guide.

http://alz.org/living_with_alzheimers_16447.asp

Exercise Can Improve Balance For Older Americans

 From the National Public Radio website, this 4 minute podcast explains how exercise can help with balance issues for older people.
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=103516803

Mayo Clinic Housecall: Free Newsletter

Sign up for Mayo Clinic's free weekly e-mail newsletter on a variety of health topics, including issues related to health and aging.

http://www.mayoclinic.com/health/housecall-newsletter/housecallarchive

Making the move to a care facility

This is the latest post from the Alzheimer's Blog at MayoClinic.com. Check out Angela Lunde's post on making the decision to move an elderly person with dementia into long-term care.

http://www.mayoclinic.com/health/alzheimers-disease-blog/

Don't lose sight of the importance of the individual in effective falls prevention interventions

from BMC Geriatrics - Latest articles by Keith D Hill

Falls remain a major public health problem, despite strong growth in the research evidence of effective single and multifactorial interventions, particularly in the community setting. A number of aspects of falls prevention require individual tailoring, despite limitations being raised regarding some of these, including questions being raised regarding the role of falls risk screening and falls risk assessment. Being able to personalise an individual's specific risk and risk factors, increase their understanding of what interventions are likely to be effective, and exploring options of choice and preference, can all impact upon whether or not an individual undertakes and sustains participation in one or more recommendations, which will ultimately influence outcomes. On all of these fronts, the individual patient receiving appropriate and targeted interventions that are meaningful, feasible and that they are motivated to implement, remains central to effective translation of falls prevention research evidence into practice.

National Elder Economic Security Blog

The Elder Economic Security program is an initiative that seeks to build economic security for elders through a multi-pronged approach that includes organizing, advocacy and research.

The Elder Economic Security Team enables policy makers, and others to develop policies and programs to help elders make ends meet. A key component of the initiative is the Elder Economic Security Standard Index (Elder Index). The Elder Index is a geographically-based measure of income needed for elders to live modestly.

May 1 is the official “blog day” for elder economic security. Sponsored by Wider Opportunities for Women (WOW), hundreds of bloggers from across the country will share their ideas and insights about what our country can do to become a more affordable place to grow old.


http://wow-eesi.blogspot.com/

Current Awareness in Aging Report

The Current Awareness in Aging Report (CAAR) is a weekly email report that helps researchers and anyone interested in aging and long-term care issues keep up to date with the latest developments in the field. The report tracks new developments in the field including:

• Data releases and updates from government and non-governmental sources,
• Working papers, reports, books, press releases and websites,
• Updates in the bibliographies of major aging-related studies,
• Journal tables of contents, and
• Conferences and grant announcements.

In addition to the weekly CAAR reports, subscribers on the electronic mailing list will receive notices of relevant newspaper articles, along with Internet pointers to the full text of the articles when such articles appear. These notices will be sent on a daily basis--no more than one message per day (due to the fact that newspaper articles on the Internet are not generally freely available for more than one day). Coverage will be limited to the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, and Washington Post at present, unless a story in another major newspaper merits attention.

Not all reports will contain selections in all the above categories. The reports are driven by the new content that becomes available on the Internet.

Subscribe by going to the following link: http://www.ssc.wisc.edu/cdha/pubs/caar.html

SAMHSA Provides a New Online Resource fo rIdeas and Discussion about Healtth System Reform

The Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) has created a new place on its website www.samhsa.gov/healthreform for posting and exchanging ideas about the issues and opportunities surrounding the future shape of America’s health system – especially on how reform may affect mental health, substance abuse prevention and treatment services.

The goal of the website is to provide background information to policy makers and opinion leaders on this important perspective of the health reform discussion. States, local governments, providers, consumers, the recovery community and family members can work together on this website to examine opportunities where health system reform might enhance prevention, treatment, and recovery services to people in need.

Electroconvulsive therapy for depressive episodes: A brief review

This brief article, posted April 1, 2009, appears on the website for Geriatrics on the Modern Medicine network.

http://geriatrics.modernmedicine.com/geriatrics/Modern+Medicine+Now/A-review-of-electroconvulsive-therapy/ArticleStandard/Article/detail/592050?ref=25#

Raising Awareness: the first step in preventing elderly suicide

This concise publication from the Alliance for Aging Research looks at the facts and statistics on suicide and aging, critical prevention efforst, supportive policies, and how to get help.

http://www.agingresearch.org/content/article/detail/2354/

Age Gain Now Empathy System (AGNES)

From the MIT AgeLab, AGNES, is a navy-blue jumpsuit laced with braces and elastic bands and a hard hat, and was developed to teach engineers in their 20s and 30s how to design products for people in their 70s.

For a video on how AGNES works, go to:
http://www.boston.com/business/technology/articles/2009/03/23/at_mits_agelab_growing_old_is_the_new_frontier/?page=1

136 Drugs That Can Cause Cognitive Impairment

Source: Worst Pills, Best Pills (Public Citizen)
From press release:

Older patients become more susceptible to drug-induced dementia and delirium as they age, but the symptoms are often overlooked by doctors who don’t realize that the condition may be caused by drugs and reversed, Public Citizen writes in a Worst Pills, Best Pills News article released today on WorstPills.org, the organization’s drug safety Web site.

Unlike most forms of dementia, such as Alzheimer’s disease, which cannot be reversed, dementia caused by prescription drug use may be stopped by discontinuing the offending medication. The drug safety experts at Public Citizen have identified 136 commonly prescribed medications, especially certain antidepressants and pain medications, that can cause difficulty thinking.

Drug-induced dementia and delirium are commonly misattributed to underlying medical illness or merely to “old age.” But by stopping or modifying the dosage of numerous, frequently prescribed drugs, most patients can be restored to a pre-drug state of mental clarity.

Older people are more susceptible to drug-induced delirium and dementia because the body’s ability to rid itself of drugs decreases with age, often because of normal age-related decrease in kidney and liver function. Also, older patients are often prescribed multiple drugs at the same time, resulting in complicated interactions and enhanced side effects. Some research also suggests older patients’ brains may be more sensitive to drugs’ effects on the central nervous system.

http://www.worstpills.org/includes/page.cfm?op_id=458

New Web-based Healthcare Screening Tool: MySeniorCare

CareData Trak announces the launch of MySeniorCare, a self-administered, web-based screening tool for detecting common geriatric syndromes in individuals aged 55 and older that may go undetected by patients or healthcare professionals.

The screening results are presented in a customizable report designed to answer the question that healthcare providers ask everyday: "Is the aging patient at risk?"

MySeniorCare was developed in cooperation with the Center for Excellence in Aging and Geriatric Health (CEAGH), The Merck Institute on Aging and Health, and the Eastern Virginia Medical School's Geriatric Practice. It meets the growing demand to effectively screen seniors for debilitating health risk factors such as falls, incontinence, depression and dementia.

http://www.caredatatrak.com/index.html