Geriatric Care Management Blog

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...