Practical information for aging health & family caregivers
Learn practical ways to improve the health and wellbeing of older adults!
Written especially for family caregivers of older adults, but useful for all who want to learn how geriatricians help aging adults.
Do you find yourself taking stock and setting goals around the time of New Year’s?
It is indeed an excellent time to reflect on the past year.
And although one can set goals at any time of year, the start of the calendar year is a time that seems to inspire many people to think about their health and how to thrive over the coming year.
If better health while aging is important to you, here are my top ten suggestions for the coming year.
Since the COVID-19 pandemic emerged in early 2020, COVID has become one of the top causes of illness and death in the US, and has especially impacted aging adults, for both health and social reasons.
Older age is one of the top risk factors for severe COVID; it’s even a stronger risk factor than vaccination status. So this is an important issue for us to follow in geriatrics.
On this page, I’ll be posting updates related to COVID and older adults, for 2023. I’ll be focusing on important developments and what I think is most important for older adults and their families to know, to be safer and manage these COVID times we are living through.
I also have a section below on general COVID safety principles for older adults.
As anticipated, we are seeing a substantial rise in COVID activity this month. This can be seen in wastewater and we’re also seeing a rise in hospitalizations.
What is a little more worrisome is that a new variant, JN.1, now seems to be taking off in the US. This variant has been active in Europe, where it is causing a marked exponential spike in COVID wastewater levels.
We are also seeing a fair amount of RSV circulating, plus some influenza.
For more on the state of these respiratory viruses, I highly recommend reading this update by epidemiologist Katelyn Jetelina, MPH PhD: State of Affairs: Dec 19, 2023.
All three of these viruses (COVID, RSV, influenza) can hospitalize vulnerable older adults 🙁
So as you consider holiday travel and gatherings, here are my recommendations:
The CDC announced recently that new COVID vaccines are available for the 2023-2024 season.
They are recommended for everyone over the age of 6 months, and are especially recommended for adults over the age of 65.
This fall, the COVID vaccine is a monovalent vaccine based on the XBB.1.5 subvariant of Omicron (which was the most prevalent variant at the beginning of the summer). Although there are different Omicron subvariants currently circulating, the XBB.1.5 is expected to provide good protection against hospitalization and deaths.
If you are a details and data person, you can find the slides presented at the 9/12/23 CDC meeting here.
Learn more about the new fall COVID vaccines here: CDC: Stay Up to Date with COVID-19 Vaccines.
I highly recommend that adults aged 65+ get this updated COVID vaccine, especially if they have not had COVID in the past 4 months.
I also recommend that aging adults get their annual flu shot (get one of the stronger ones recommended for older adults) and consider the new RSV vaccine for older adults.
Otherwise, my recommendations for how to stay safe in regards to COVID have not changed since my most recent video update from August, which you can view below.
Here is my most recent video update, from August 14, 2023: [Read more…]
In another article, I’ve explained the key reasons that I recommend older adults and their caregivers have a blood pressure (BP) monitor at home.
To very briefly recap:
In this post, I’ll share some tips on choosing and using a home BP monitor.
And don’t worry: I won’t tell you that you have to plan on checking every day for the rest of your lives. Although there are times when it’s great to check daily — like the week after a change in medication — the most important thing is to have a good BP monitor at home and know how to use it at least occasionally.
One of the most common questions I get asked is “How can I get care for my aging parent and how much will it cost?”
The answer generally depends on these factors:
These are important questions to consider. If your aging parent seems to need help, it’s imperative to find out what are your options for providing the needed support. And finances do often determine how a family proceeds with arranging elder care.
And even if your aging parent doesn’t need help now, they very well might in the future. So it’s also reasonable to plan ahead, and consider how elder care might be provided, if/when it becomes needed in the future.
Now, the truth is that most older adults don’t need much assistance from others. But research shows about 70% of older adults do end up needing some form of “senior care,” for a time ranging from a few months to several years.
So in this article, I’ll share the key things to know, about options for elder care and how to pay for it. Specifically, I’ll cover: [Read more…]
Want to keep your brain — or the brain of someone you love — as healthy as possible?
Then it’s essential to know which commonly used medications affect brain function.
In this article, I’ll go into details regarding a type of medication that I wish all older adults knew about: anticholinergic drugs.
Most older adults don’t need much help from others.
In fact, many of them are quite busy assisting others and otherwise contributing to their families, communities, and/or workplaces.
But of course, many older people eventually do need some help from others, especially if they live into their 80s, 90s, or beyond. After all, only a minority of people transition from being fully independent to deceased, with no intervening period of needing assistance.
(Wondering how to get an older person to accept help? That’s covered here: 6 Steps to Take When Aging Parents Need Help – Even if They’re Resisting.)
When an older person does start to need help, it tends to be close family members — assuming the person has family — that step in: spouses, adult children, siblings, nephews or nieces, grandchildren, and so forth. In fact, family members are by far the number one source of “long-term care supports and services” for older adults.
Sometimes providing this eldercare support can be fairly straightforward: a little help with transportation, or arranging for some assistance with shopping or household chores.
But in other cases, family members find themselves having to take on quite a lot. This is often due to health issues affecting the older person’s ability to remain independent and manage various aspects of life.
Some situations that commonly bring this on include:
[Read more…]
Worried about falls in an older person?
You’re right to be concerned, especially if the older person has already experienced a fall. Research suggests that falling once doubles your chance of falling again.
And falls, as everyone knows, can cause life-changing injuries. The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) reports that:
For these reasons and more, preventing falls is a major focus of preventive care for older adults, and is a big part of what we do in geriatrics. (Learn more about how we do this in this article: Why Older People Fall & How to Reduce Fall Risk.)
But if we want to protect older people from the potentially devastating consequences of falls, it’s not enough to help them reduce falls.
We also need to think about how we can reduce the likelihood of injury from a fall.
In this article, I’ll share with you three approaches that can help reduce fall-related injuries.
Then I’ll address two other approaches that are sometimes tried, but are less likely to help.
It’s getting to be that time of the year: the season when many of us start looking for a thoughtful gift to give to an older loved one.
I’ll be honest: I’m not much of a shopper and it’s not my style to give physical gifts just for the sake of doing so.
But I do think it can be wonderful to give something that brightens a person’s day.
And it’s even better when a gift is practical, useful, or otherwise helps an older person make the best out of life.
One of my favorite resources, when it comes to identifying useful items to help with age-related challenges or caregiving, are the lists put together by DailyCaring.com.
They have a great list of 50 top gift ideas for seniors, and another terrific list of gifts related to Alzheimer’s and dementia.
In this article, I’ll share my list of eight gifts that can help older adults cope with common late-life challenges.
Four are for older adults in general, and then four are especially useful for those living with Alzheimer’s or a related dementia.
Have you been getting worried about your aging parent, or wondering if they are ok continuing to live as they are?
Maybe they’ve been mostly okay but now you’re spotting some problems with memory, such as forgetfulness or asking the same questions repeatedly. Or maybe you’ve noticed trouble with driving, keeping up the house, managing stairs, or paying bills.
Some aging parents simply begin to seem more withdrawn. Others start leveling accusations at others, claiming someone took or moved something, or acting paranoid.
When families notice these types of changes, it’s often really hard to know what to do next. How do you know if they really need help or not, and what kind of help to get? And what do you do if they refuse to discuss it, or get mad when you bring it up?
Since this is such a common dilemma for families, I’ve recorded a video, explaining exactly what you can do, if you’ve noticed some worrisome changes in your parent and are trying to figure out what to do next. Here’s how to know if your aging parent needs help, and how to talk to them about your concerns.
This video covers:
[Read more…]
If I had to recommend one key piece of healthcare equipment that older adults & caregivers should have at home, it would be this: a good home blood pressure (BP) monitor.
Why? Because BP measurements (and pulse measurements, which machines check at the same time) are an incredibly useful tool when it comes to assessing and optimizing an older person’s health and well-being. This is true even for those older people who aren’t being treated for hypertension (chronic high BP).
As I’d love for more older adults and families to understand how home BP monitors can help them, in this article I’ll explain how home BP monitors can be helpful specifically for older adults. (And then see my related article here: Choosing & Using a Home Blood Pressure Monitor, & What to Ask the Doctor .)
This work by Leslie Kernisan MD & Better Health While Aging LLC is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
Based on a work at BetterHealthWhileAging.net.
