From Nursing Homes to Home Care

Home care is expanding as the bulge of the population ages home care offers more care options for elderly who can no longer afford or need professional ’round the clock care.

Over the next three years, New York State plans to shift 70,000 to 80,000 people who need more than 120 days of Medicaid-reimbursed long-term care services and are not in nursing homes into managed care models, Mr. Helgerson said.

The move away from nursing homes was highlighted on Thursday when Cardinal Timothy M. Dolan announced that the Archdiocese of New York, one of the state’s largest providers of nursing home care, is selling two of its seven nursing homes and opening or planning to open seven new adult day-care centers over the next three years.

Health Problems of the Elderly Could Be the Result of Aging Eyes

The theory is that as eyes age blue light gets filtered out, affecting circadian rhythm and health in older adults.

Circadian rhythms are the cyclical hormonal and physiological processes that rally the body in the morning to tackle the day’s demands and slow it down at night, allowing the body to rest and repair. This internal clock relies on light to function properly, and studies have found that people whose circadian rhythms are out of sync, like shift workers, are at greater risk for a number of ailments, including insomnia, heart disease and cancer.

Eye health should not be ignored.

Consult your physician for all the options available for your maximum well being.

End of Life Planning is Awkward for Professionals

Conversations doctors don’t want to have include the end of options for the terminally ill.

Whether it’s lack of training or cultural resistance to discuss death and dying there are huge gaps in patient care at the end of life.

In this country, we tiptoe around the D-word until so late in the game that even now, when more than 40 percent of Americans die under hospice care, about half do so within two weeks of admission. Even expert hospice teams can’t provide many of the elements of a good death — and they believe there is such a thing — in mere days.

We can blame some of this evasiveness on physicians, trained to save lives. But families bear some responsibility, too; they may not seek or seem to welcome a frank assessment. Either way, while many patients do have breakpoint conversations, ignorance often rules.

Healthy Habits May Not Be the Secret to Longevity

In fact, the secret to living to 100 or more may be all in the genes.

New research suggests that your life choices might not be the crucial factor in determining whether you make it to 95 or beyond; it finds that many extremely old people appear to have been as bad as everyone else at indulging in poor health habits during their younger years.

This is not an excuse to make unhealthy diet choices or to skip regular exercise.

You may be genetically blessed with long lived genes but the quality of your life may be impacted by your environment and habits.

A long life can still be plagued with chronic illness or debilitating ailments.

A healthy lifestyle is still the best defense against disease.

Discovery of New Alzheimer’s Disease Risk Genes May Help in Treating Patients

Alzhimer’s is a growing problem as the population ages.

The challenge lies in early detection and treatments which target the four degenerative pathways to alzheimer’s disease.

Alzheimer’s disease is the leading cause of dementia and the sixth leading cause of death in the U.S., according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Although specific genetic mutations are known to cause the early onset form of the disease, the late onset form is thought to arise from a complex interaction of susceptibility genes and other risk factors

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