Geriatric Care Management Blog

Alzheimer’s Disease is the most common form of dementia, affecting about 5.3 Americans, and it is expected to grow to 15 million Americans with this disease by the middle of this century.  Almost everyone has heard about the condition, and we even see advertisements on television for medicines that may be able to slow the progression of the disease.  What we probably do not hear a lot about is that Alzheimer’s commonly is accompanied by other neurological problems that caregivers and Alzheimer’s patients’ providers should be looking for. While challenging to diagnose in patients with Alzheimer’s or other dementias, depression reportedly affects as many as 20 to 32% of dementia patients.  It is particularly common with those who manifest vascular dementia.  It is hard for providers to diagnose, because the confusion or lack of focus common to depression also are frequently the hallmark of dementia as well.  As a caregiver, be alert to insomnia or hypersomnia as well as agitation or suicidality in patients...

I have written in past blogs about some of the inevitable decline of physical capabilities associated with aging, and a lot of them are not really a surprise.  We all walk more slowly, we see and hear less clearly, and strength and endurance just are not what they may have been at age thirty by the time we hit seventy.  But we do not always think about the sense of smell becoming less acute with age, and there are really important medical and safety risks when a person’s sense of smell begins to fail. Research reported some time ago in the Journal of the American Medical Association documented that people’s olfactory acuity slips as they age, so much so that it may surprise you to know that 62.5% of persons over age 80 had “impaired olfaction.”  Only about 15% of men and women over age 80 were even aware of their shortfall.  So what, you may say?

Elders who age in place also are typically living in older...

It's Breast Cancer Awareness Month, and I had a question from one of my clients about why should she worry about breast cancer “at her age?”  We devote a lot of press to mothers and daughters and sisters and spouses, but what about grandmothers and great-grandmothers?  What I am going to share with you in this posting may seem a bit of a surprise, because we tend to focus a lot of our attention on women who are in their prime when we think about breast cancer.  We may even think that older - and very post-menopausal - women need not be as concerned about a medical risk often associated with hormonal activity. There has been research at Memorial Sloan-Kettering that basically says that regular testing works as well if not better for older patients as it does for younger patients, because if the cancer is caught early – and therefore small – these women have a very favorable prognosis.  In other research at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston doctors followed about 65,000 women who had been diagnosed...

What do hearing aids, exercise, support groups and travel have in common?  They all are ways that individuals suffering from Alzheimer’s Disease, specifically, or dementia, generally, can fight these diseases’ progression.  Even more important, they help to fight the personal isolation that accompanies these frightening conditions. We often associate dementias with older adults and the stereotypic confusion that can characterize the individuals with the diagnoses.  But it is not just a condition of older adults as the recent public disclosure of The University of Tennessee women’s basketball coach, Pat Summit, highlights.  Ms. Summit is just 59 as she goes public with her diagnosis, and it helps others to understand that it can happen as early as 30 and 40 years of age.  Younger onset Alzheimer’s Disease technically speaking is the manifestation affecting those under age 65, and there are 250,000 new cases in America every year.  Yet, there are ways to fight the downward spiral of dementia.

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