Community on Aging Knowledge Exchange (CAKE)

Social factors impact excessive drinking in older adults.

29 January 2010, 7:00 am

New research, due to be published in the April edition of Alcoholism: Clinical & Experimental Research, reports that older adults who “have more money, engage in more social activities, and whose friends approve more of drinking are more likely to engage in excessive or high-risk drinking.” drinks

Rudolf H. Moos, senior research career scientist for the Department of Veterans Affairs Health Care System in Palo Alto, California says “Our findings show that, one, certain social factors may enhance the chances of an individual engaging in high-risk drinking and, two, once high-risk drinking has developed, social choices may be made to facilitate continuing this behavior.”

One of these choices, Moos reports, includes surrounding oneself with friends who also drink: “Older adults who engage in high-risk alcohol consumption tend to select friends who are more likely to drink and to approve of drinking. They may also experience a decline in the quality of relationships with extended family members, that is, high-risk drinking may impair some family relationships. ”

Moos also notes a gender difference: “Compared to older women, older men may be more vulnerable or susceptible to some social influences on drinking. Specifically, having more money, and friends who approve more of drinking, seem to be more closely related to high-risk drinking among older men than among older women.”

Read the full article here.

Filed under Research. Tagged alcohol, alcoholism, Department of Veterans Affairs, gender, Research, Rudolph Moos, seniors

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Irrelevant information? Older brains love it.

24 January 2010, 10:34 pm

New research published this week in Psychological Science has shown that while older brains have more difficulty filtering out extraneous information than younger brains, they appear to make great use of this information. brain

Karen Campbell, a PhD student in psychology at the University of Toronto, working with the Rotman Institute, says “We found that older brains are not only less likely to suppress irrelevant information than younger brains, but they can link the relevant and irrelevant pieces of information together and implicitly transfer this knowledge to subsequent memory tasks.

Dr. Lynn Hasher, whose work at the Rotman Institute focuses on inhibitory control over the contents of working memory, explains the advantage of this process:

“This could be a silver lining to aging and distraction. Older adults with reduced attentional regulation seem to display greater knowledge of seemingly extraneous co-occurrences in the environment than younger adults. As this type of knowledge is thought to play a critical role in real world decision- making, older adults may be the wiser decision-makers compared to younger adults because they have picked up so much more information.”

Read the full article here.

Filed under Research. Tagged aging, brain, Dr, Karen Campbell, Lynn Hasher, memory, Research, Rotman Institute, seniors, University of Toronto

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Vitamin D for nursing home patients can reduce falls.

20 January 2010, 8:00 am

A new systematic review from the Sydney Medical School at the University of Sydney in Ryde, Australia, has shown that giving people living in nursing facilities vitamin D can reduce the rate of falls. The Cochrane review, led by Dr. Ian Cameron examined 41 previous trials involving 25,422 older people, who were mostly women. walkingstick

“Five trials tested the effects of giving vitamin D to patients in nursing facilities, where it was found to be an effective measure for preventing falls. The researchers found that multifactorial interventions, which often incorporated exercise, medication, or environmental factors including appropriate equipment, reduced the risk of falls in hospitals. In nursing homes, the effects of multifactorial interventions were not significant overall. However, the researchers concluded that multifactorial interventions provided by multidisciplinary teams in these facilities may reduce the rate and risk of falls.”

Dr. Cameron points out the importance of a multi-disciplinary approach:”In our review, we saw limited evidence that these combined interventions work, but we could more confidently recommend them if they were delivered by a multidisciplinary team. Currently, there’s no one component of any of these programmes that stands out as more important than any other and we’re also missing data on whether increased supervision or new technologies such as alarm systems are of any benefit.”

Read the full article here.

In Halifax, there is the Geriatric Day Hospital and Falls Clinic. Click here for their information.

Do you know of any other falls prevention programs in Nova Scotia? Email us at info@cakens.com and we will include them in our links.

Filed under Research. Tagged Cochrane review, Dr. Ian Cameron, falls, nursing homes, Research, University of Sydney, vitamin D

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Lunch&Learn with GANS – Emergency preparedness and older adults

12 January 2010, 8:00 am

On Friday January 22, 2010, GANS will host their first Lunch and Learn session of 2010. GANS Lunch and Learn January 22 2010 small copy

Topic:Emergency Preparedness: do older adults help or need help in emergencies?
Speaker: John Webb, the Provincial Director of Emergency Social Services.
Time:12:00-1:00pm
Date: Friday January 22, 2010
Place: Royal Bank Theatre, 1st floor, Halifax Infirmary, Summer St, Halifax.

A light lunch will be provided courtesy of the Department of Seniors.

For those of you who cannot attend this session, we will be capturing it on video and hosting it here at CAKEns.com. When it has been uploaded to the site, we will email our members to let you know.
For those who do plan to attend, feel free to bring a friend!

We are planning a continuing series of Lunch and Learns through May of this year, and will be posting the times, dates and topics for this in the very near future.

Filed under Events. Tagged emergency preparedness, Events, GANS, John Webb, Lunch&Learn, Nova Scotia, Nova Scotia Department of Seniors, Resources/Programs, seniors

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Silver Economy Summit, Halifax, May 2010 – call for papers

7 January 2010, 10:51 am

The Silver Economy Summit will take place this year in Halifax, Nova Scotia, May 13-14. SilverSummit

Presented by the Nova Scotia Department of Seniors, the Summit “will gather international, national and provincial perspectives on the economic and societal changes that arise from an aging population. Join 350 Summit delegates from a wide variety of social and economic sectors. Make connections, and share opportunities and information that will help your organization further your mandate and interests in today’s and tomorrow’s Silver Economy.”

The Summit is modeled after a series of three events held by the Silver Economy Network of European Regions, the most recent being held in June 2007 in Spain, and is the first Silver Economy Summit to be held outside of the European Union.

The organizers of the Silver Economy Summit invite submissions of papers in three theme areas. (click the link below to read more)

Continue reading ‘Silver Economy Summit, Halifax, May 2010 – call for papers’ »

Filed under Events. Tagged aging, Dalhousie Univeristy, Events, Nova Scotia, NS Dept of Seniors, Research, seniors, Silver Economy Summit

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Rising Tide – new report on dementia issued by Alzheimer Society of Canada

4 January 2010, 1:02 pm

The Alzheimer Society of Canada has released Rising Tide: the Impact of Dementia on Canadian Society, This is the final report of an Alzheimer Society project funded by Pfizer Canada, Health Canada, the Public Health Agency of Canada, the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, and RX&D. asns copy

Currently in Canada, there are 103,700 new cases of dementia every year, or 1 every 5 minutes. This report suggests that by 2038, this will have risen to 257,800 new cases per year, or 1 every 2 minutes.

David Harvey, Principal Spokesperson for the Rising Tide project says “If nothing changes, this sharp increase in the number of people living with dementia will mean that by 2038, the total costs associated with dementia will reach $153 billion a year. This amounts to a massive cumulative total of $872 billion over this 30-year period.”

You can read the Alzheimer Society’s press release here, a summary of Rising Tide here and download the full report here.

Filed under News. Tagged Alzheimer Society of Canada, alzheimer's, Canadian Institutes of Health Resarch, dementia, Health Canada, Pfizer Canada, Public Health Agency of Canada, Research, Rising Tide, RX&D

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Elderly people have the greatest risk for major depression.

22 December 2009, 9:18 am

Medical News Today reports that researchers at the University of Rochester Medical Center have unveiled results from a study that they say has pinpointed the identifying factors in who, among those 65+, will be at greatest risk for major depression. elderly_man_with_cane

The researchers studied data from over 600 people aged 65+, who had no active diagnosis of depression. The subjects were given follow up interviews over a period of four years. Approximately 5 percent of the patients had an episode of major depression during that time.

The article reports report: “People with low-level depressive symptoms, who perceive that they have poor quality social support from other people, and with a past history of depression, were at particularly high risk to develop major depression within the one-to-four year time period of the study,” Lyness said. “This is good news, as we in the field are just learning how to prevent depression in particular high-risk groups. Future work will be able to test whether any of a variety of treatments – perhaps psychotherapy, perhaps medication, perhaps other things such as exercise – will help to prevent depression in persons suffering from the risks we identified in this study.”

Read the full article here.

Filed under Health and Well Being, Research. Tagged depression, health, Research, seniors, Univeristy of Rochester Medical Center

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Understanding the mechanisms of ageing – worth a Nobel Prize!

13 December 2009, 10:21 am

Three American scientists Elizabeth Blackburn (University of California, San Fransisco) , Carol Greider (Johns Hopkins University) and Jack Szostak (Harvard Medical School), have been awarded the Nobel Prize for Medicine for their discovery of how chromosomes are protected by telomeres and the enzyme telomerase.

Telomere

In short:

“Telomeres are the tails of chromosomes; they are an indicator of history and replicative potential of the cell. Research in the last three decades indicates that telomeres are key factors in several biological fields such as cancer and ageing. Because of the long lifespan of humans and their short telomeres, attrition in telomere length may be a major determinant of human ageing not only at cellular level, but also at organ and perhaps systemic levels. The research contributed to the understanding of how telomeres protect chromosomes from degradation and identified telomerase, the enzyme that preserves telomere length and integrity.” (read the full article here)

Recent studies carried out by the prize recipients have shown that the enzyme telomerase has restorative capabilities for telomeres and can help keep these cells in a healthy condition. Dr. Jean Pierre Baeyens, of the International Association of Gerontology and Geriatrics says “…the ageing process remains a large domain of research and all mechanisms are not depicted yet. These recent discoveries are a real step forward to attract young scientist to the new fields of research and clinical practice in Geriatric Medicine and Gerontology.”

Click here to watch a video of the Nobel Prize announcement, with a short explanatory presentation of the work.

Filed under Health and Well Being, Research. Tagged aging, Carol Greider, Elizabeth Blackburn, geriatric medicine, geriatrics, gerontology, Harvard Medical School, Jack Szostak, Johns Hopkins Univeristy, medicine, Nobel Prize, Research, University of California

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