Geriatric Care Management Blog

Scientists have reported exciting research on Alzheimer’s disease that points to risk factors which, if reduced by 25%, could cut the world-wide prevalence of Alzheimer’s by ten percent.   If these findings are supported by future research, the reduction could translate into more than three million fewer cases of 34 million cases of Alzheimer’s reported globally.  Reducing the risky conditions or behaviors by even ten percent could reduce the number of cases of Alzheimer’s world-wide by about 1.1 million. In my experience as a geriatric care manager, one of the hardest medical conditions that I help families with is Alzheimer’s or other forms of dementia.  This is truly hard not just on the patient who loses their mental faculties and with them the ability to maintain quality of life, but it also very much affects the caregivers who watch their loved ones simply fade away.  But researchers from the University of California, San Francisco, have reported...

In my experience as a geriatric care manager, I field a lot of questions from people who are suddenly faced with caring for an older parent or spouse.  For people who become caregivers overnight after a parent has a fall or experiences a significant medical setback of some sort, it can be an overwhelming responsibility.  Where does one go to learn how to be a caregiver for an older adult or someone else with special needs?  It is easy to tell a person how to become certified as a geriatric care manager (not as easy getting certified) or even a paramedic (again, not as easy getting certified), but how do you become a caregiver right away? 

As much as some folks may have a predisposition for being “good with people,” being a caregiver poses some unique challenges and an aspiring caregiver can benefit from some special training.  One of the resources I featured last month, Julie Northcutt – President of CaregiverList.com, talked about using summer visits...

In many of my postings on family caregivers I have talked about the really hard job of caring for an older adult or someone else with special needs.  At the personal level it truly is an enormous responsibility with great demands on a person’s time and their emotional well-being.  The most recent report on family caregiving published by AARP, however, really provides a sense of the huge and important work that caregivers are providing for their families in America today.  It is required reading for caregivers and their families. In AARP’s snapshot of caregiving in America, they estimate that as many as 42.1 million people in 2009 were providing some sort of help with activities of daily living to an older adult.  That number jumps about 50% when you look at all the people engaged in some sort of caregiving at any point during the year: 61.6 million people.  And these individuals are offering their support as unpaid caregivers. ...

In my past two blog postings I have talked about some recent warnings from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) that concern me as a geriatric care manager, and they should concern caregivers and the elders in their charge as well.  This most recent and third warning was about some of the dosing for drugs that are used for people who may be anemic or suffer from chronic kidney disease or be on chemotherapy of some sort.  As you may suspect, this is a relatively smaller segment of the adult population, and as you will see here, it gets even smaller as we are mainly talking about people with chronic kidney disease.  But one of these medications has been part of one of my client’s standard monthly routine for some time, so it struck closer to home.

You may know these drugs by their brand names if you or a loved one has one of the conditions.  The brand names are Procrit, Epotin or Aranesp, and they help the body increase the red blood cell count for people with some types of anemia.  These drugs, referred to as erythropoiesis-stimulating agents or ESAs, are also now known to increase patients’ risk of cardiovascular events.  As with the other two warnings I have posted, these risks only became known over time as more and more people were given these medications.  This is because the actual cardiovascular events they can cause are still fairly rare.

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In the first of my present series of postings on recent Food and Drug Administration (FDA) warnings, I had talked about new evidence of long term health risks from some pain medications that are available both in prescription and over the counter (OTC).  In this posting, I am going to share with you another FDA warning, this one for prescription medications that lower cholesterol.  The “family” of medications is commonly called statins and includes some very well known brands that many of you have seen advertised on television and in magazines.  Others of you or the people you care for may also be taking these medications. All Americans have been alerted to the risks posed by increasingly high levels of cholesterol many of us have in our bloodstreams owing to eating foods high in fats or just plain eating too much.  One way to address the elevated “bad cholesterol” or low density lipids (LDLs) is through diet and exercise.  But for people with persistently...

Within the past two weeks the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has issued a number of warnings that concern me as a geriatric care manager, and they should concern caregivers and the elders in their charge as well.  The FDA has announced new warnings for three different classes of medications, those for pain and inflammation, those that lower cholesterol and those that help treat anemia in some patients.  In my next three postings, I am going to tackle each, so that you will have a clearer picture of how to safeguard your own health as well as the health of an elder for whom you may be a caregiver.

I am going to start with a group of drugs commonly called non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs or NSAIDs.  You would recognize the brand names, Aleeve, Motrin, Advil, or Nuprin as well as their generic names, naproxen or ibuprofen, and a lot of people use them to good effect.  Many people use these...