Challenging your brain keeps it sharp as you age After she retired from her job as a medical transcriptionist, Elaine Savage grew isolated. She rarely went out or talked to friends on the phone. She relied on her family to do her grocery shopping. Then, a class changed her life. After seeing a leaflet, Savage signed up to take part in a study on aging run by psychologists at the University of Texas at Dallas. There, researchers assigned her to a 14-week course on digital photography and quilting. Meeting new people and learning new things whet her appetite for adventure. Participating in the UTD study, Savage says, “is probably one of the highlights of my life.” Those results are well beyond what Denise Park, head of UTD’s Center for Vital Longevity, might have expected. As people age, the frontal areas of the brain — those associated with learning, reason and memory — shrink. Those physical changes in the brain lead to declines such as memory lapses, difficulty learning new things and trouble shifting focus from one task to another.
Family Issues | How to Talk to the Elderly About Tough Family Issues Adult children and their parents often have trouble talking effectively. Small disagreements can be irksome and frustrating; if they simmer and grow, they can poison your last precious months and years together. What causes these misunderstandings? As a culture, we tend to view our elderly parents as essentially obsolete -- like old cars destined for the scrap heap. For most people, midlife is a time of independence and mastery. As an adult in middle age, you move quickly and efficiently through the world, completing tasks and taking care of your many responsibilities, looking ahead to the next mountain to climb. It's these different perspectives that can lead to breakdowns in communication between you and your parents.
Where's my car? Guarding against brain glitches - Health - Behavior A few years back Sarah Kelly, 34, of Fairhope, Ala., loaded her two kids into the car at a store parking lot and forgot her double stroller in the space beside her, driving away and abandoning it. Worse, she did it again a few months later. Two potentially pricey memory lapses, but Kelly chalked it up to mommy brain. Depending on your stage of life, you might call it a brain fart or a senior moment. “We have these memory slips at any age; we just don’t pay attention to them when we’re younger,” says Cynthia Green, assistant clinical professor in the department of psychiatry at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine. Before you diagnose yourself with Alzheimer’s disease, take heart: Most memory lapses are normal. Don’t I know you from somewhere? When you meet someone you want to remember anywhere, try to note some physical feature about them. Tip of the tongue syndrome It’s frustrating when you can’t come up with the word you want or the name of a book or a movie. © 2013 msnbc.com Reprints
Nutrition.com.sg - Healthy Eating - Healthy Eating For Seniors Fibre is more important than ever to prevent constipation and gastrointestinal diseases such as diverticulosis (formation of pouches in the lining of the large intestine that can cause spasm or cramping). At around age 40, calcium and other minerals start to move out of bones faster than they can be replaced. In women at menopause, the drop in estrogen (which helps bones hold on to calcium) causes greater bone loss than in men. Antioxidant vitamins E, C and beta carotene (a form of vitamin A) have prompted considerable discussion about their health-promoting benefits. Should Your Elderly Parent Still Live Alone? Recently I received a call from Michelle, an exasperated adult daughter asking if there was any legal way to get her elderly father to stop verbally abusing her and to accept a caregiver so she could move out of his house. She had moved in to help him after her mom passed, but was now trapped as he refused to move to assisted living or accept live-in help. Michelle started to cry, saying she had just called an agency where a man "laughed at me," saying her father could do whatever he wished in his own home short of physically abusing her. Since I have survived the same situation with my own father, I knew the misery she was going through. Find an Independent Living Community » It reminded me of a call I received from another adult child, Paul, begging for my advice on the same situation. I wish I had the iron-clad solution to this problem to help so many people.
With love and fear, Alzheimer's youngest caretakers watch over parents Austin Mobley, 16, sits between his parents, Allen and Tracy Mobley, in their Elkland, Missouri, house. His mom has dementia. Children end up being unplanned caregivers for parents with Alzheimer's, dementiaAlzheimer's Association estimated in 2003 that 250,000 caregivers are under age 18Teen describes helping mom is like reteaching a baby new skills she'll never remember (CNN) -- One Saturday morning, Austin Mobley noticed his mother staring at him blankly. "Who are you?" "Mom, are you joking with me or what?" "No," she replied. It's a gnawing fear that one fateful day, the memories of aging parents will fade and they won't be able to recognize their own children. For Austin, it started early. Austin is in an emerging generation of young caregivers of parents who have dementia. The boy from Elkland, Missouri, would make sure his mom didn't leave the stove on or wander out of the house. "It's not at an age to care for a parent with Alzheimer's," Drew said. She said, "It was scary for him.
Nutrition and older adults | Nutrition Australia Eat well to age well As you get older, it’s important to continue choosing healthy foods and enjoying eating as a social activity that you can look forward to. However as we get older our lifestyles and appetite can change and this can affect the types and amounts of foods we eat. A decreasing appetite or reduced ability to buy and prepare healthy foods can mean that many older people don’t get enough essential vitamins, mineral and fibre, and this can contribute to general unwellness or exacerbate some chronic illness. It is important to use every meal and snack as an opportunity for maximum nutrition and find ways to improve your diet to fit with your personal tastes, ability and lifestyle, even if this means asking for help from friends, family or other community services. Ask your doctor, health centre or hospital, or local council for available support services in your community, or visit www.seniors.gov.au On this page: Use less salt Drink more water Limit your intake of high fat foods
The dilemma of taking care of elderly parents It has become the baby boom generation’s latest and, in some ways, most agonizing life crisis: what to do when the parents who once took care of you can no longer take care of themselves. Raise your hand if you’re one of the 60-year-olds reading this who has one or more living 80-year-old parents. Listen in on a group of middle-aged children of the elderly, and you’ll hear that even the most casual mention of aging parents is likely to open up a Pandora’s box of anxieties. Even if their parents are still doing fine, middle-aged children need only look around at friends and neighbors to be reminded that these anxieties will become theirs one day. I see it with my own 63-year-old daughter, who wants me — her 87-year-old mother — to be in touch when I leave town, even if only for a few days or a week, who calls when she’s traveling though she never did before, whose anxiety announces itself over the phone lines when we haven’t talked for a while: “Are you OK?” It’s a no-win situation.