• 65 years or older;
• married or in a common-law relationship;
• living at home with their spouse/partner;
• caring for/ supporting their spouse/partner due to spouse’s/partner’s memory problems, cognitive impairment or a diagnosed dementia (we are looking for individuals who are caring for those at all stages of impairment, from the early signs to very severe dementia).

They encourage anyone who is aware of someone in this situation, and who might be interested in participating in such a study to make them aware of the project website and contact information below.  Additionally, anyone interested in receiving more information should not hesitate to contact them:

 
Timing of the C.A.R.E. Tool Project
Mary Leslie, Project Manager
Nova Scotia Centre on Aging, Mount Saint Vincent University
Tel: (902) 457-6573 or Toll free: 1-877-302-4440
Email: caretool@msvu.ca
Website: www.msvu.ca/nsca/caregiverassessment (and click Timing of the CARE Tool in left bar).

Subscribe for daily delivery of the latest in ageing news!

Simply click the ‘subscribe’ button (on the right of the screen) when you are visiting the paper to have it delivered to your inbox daily. Click here to visit the latest edition.

The paper is updated every day with new stories, links and more!

This symposium will touch on topics of interest within Continuing Care, from home care to nursing homes, that appeal to administrators and managers, health care providers, researchers and students. It will also cover innovative ways of how we transfer knowledge gained from research initiatives into our daily lives.

To download the brochure and registration form, click here.

Date is June 13, 2011

Time: 8 am-4pm

Location: Holiday Inn Harbourview, Dartmouth, NS

For more information, call 902-454-3069

Left to right: Xiaowei Song, Pulin Yu, Kenneth Rockwood, Chinese Community Doctors (3), Xianghua Fang

Led in Canada by Dr. Kenneth Rockwood of the Geriatric Medicine Research Unit (GMRU) and in China by Dr. Xianghua Fang at the Beijing Institute of Geriatrics, a team of researchers are spending three years working together on issues that arise due to an aging population

The increasing proportion of elderly people presents multiple challenges for health care, and this is particularly dramatic in China where  between 2000 and 2050, the proportion of people aged 65 and older will rise from 7% to 23%, numbering more than 332 million.

There is a great amount of health data on this population  accumulated in China, but the research capacity to process and explore these data is still limited.  This collaboration makes  use of resources and skills of those at the GMRU to help advance understanding of this problem in China.

Representing the Chinese team in Canada is Shi Jing, an epidemiologist who is not only acquiring the skills to analyze the Chinese datasets, but will take these skills back with her to China at the end of her one year stay here, and pass these on to other researchers there.

The Canadian team is currently preparing for a trip to China in May, where they will make several presentations at the 3rd National Conference of the Prevention of Common Diseases in the Elderly in Yichang Hubei, May 7-9.  The China-Canada Collaboration is funded jointly by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (Institute of Aging) and the National Natural Science Foundation of China.

The study appointment will take approximately two and a half hours. Participants will receive a contribution toward expenses they may incur due to participation in this study and can receive an image of their brain from the MRI!

Participants are encouraged to have a family member accompany them.  Volunteers must:

1)   be older adults (ages 60 – 90)

2)   be fluent in English

3)   have normal vision OR if you are uncertain about your vision without glasses, there is a sample diagram you can try.

4)   meet all MRI safety criteria (no metal in your body except for fillings)

5)   be either cognitively healthy OR have mild Alzheimer’s Disease with no other cognitive impairments

6)   be a healthy adult meeting the criteria outlined in (1 – 4 above)

Who to Contact: Janet Marshall, Administrator (473 1850), or  Dr. Xiaowei Song, Investigator (473 1876)          

Where:

National Research Council – Institute for Biodiagnostics (Atlantic)

Neuroimaging Research Laboratory

Suite 3900, QEII Health Sciences Centre – Halifax Infirmary

January, 2009 | Version #2 | CDHA-RS/2009-287 | OREB2009-02

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.

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.

“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.

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)