Never Stop Dancing: Breaking Stereotypes of Disability in Older Adults One Step at a Time

We have written a lot about disability in older adults here on GeriPal. Here are just a couple of examples:

If I had to sum these posts up in a couple words, it would be that successful aging does not equal aging without disability. If I had to sum these posts in a video, it would be this:

Post by Stanton Warriors.

by: Eric Widera (@ewidera)

Comments

Sara Himelstein said…

Hi,
This posting was a thought provoking addition to my morning that I really enjoyed. It accords with a social work way of looking at the pople we work with in a fuller way.
As an aside, i'd love to see some info on issues like hearing and sight loss and how this affects folks as they age. Especially as the major age group now is the baby boomers who are hitting the big 65 and more.

Crossing a university being blind or finding your way being deaf or hard of hearing has its challenges and socialization optiosn can be really affected as well as ADLs and IADLs.
Sara Himesltein MSW RSW

July 22, 2014 at 9:56 AM

Lynn said…

Here's another one for your entertainment:
http://youtu.be/ryJBmwzYfaM

July 22, 2014 at 9:27 PM

Geroscience and it's Impact on the Human Healthspan: A podcast with John Newman

Ok, I'll admit it. When I hear the phrase "the biology of aging" I'm mentally preparing myself to only understand about 5% of what the presenter is going to talk about (that's on a good day). While I have words like telomeres, sirtuins, or senolytics memorized for the boards, I've never been able to see how this applies to my clinical practice as it always feels so theoretical. Well, today that changed for me thanks to our podcast interview with John Newman, a "geroscientist" and geriatrician here at UCSF and at the Buck Institute for Research on Aging.

In this podcast, John breaks down what geroscience is and how it impacts how we think about many age-related conditions and diseases. For example, rather than thinking about multimorbidity as the random collection of multiple different clinical problems, we can see it as an expression of the fundamental mechanisms of aging. This means, that rather than treating individuals diseases, targeting …

The Dangers of Fleet Enemas

The dangers of oral sodium phosphate preparations are fairly well known in the medical community. In 2006 the FDA issued it’s first warning that patients taking oral sodium phosphate preparations are at risk for potential for acute kidney injury. Two years later, over-the-counter preparations of these drugs were voluntarily withdrawn by the manufacturers. Those agents still available by prescription were given black box warnings mainly due to acute phosphate nephropathy that can result in renal failure, especially in older adults. Despite all this talk of oral preparations, little was mentioned about a sodium phosphate preparation that is still available over-the-counter – the Fleet enema.

Why Oral Sodium Phosphate Preparations Are Dangerous

Before we go into the risks of Fleet enemas, lets spend just a couple sentences on why oral sodium phosphate preparations carry significant risks. First, oral sodium phosphate preparations can cause significant fluid shifts within the colon …

Length of Stay in Nursing Homes at the End of Life

One out of every four of us will die while residing in a nursing home. For most of us, that stay in a nursing home will be brief, although this may depend upon social and demographic variables like our gender, net worth, and marital status. These are the conclusions of an important new study published in JAGS by Kelly and colleagues (many of whom are geripal contributors, including Alex Smith and Ken Covinsky).

The study authors used data from the Health and Retirement Study (HRS) to describe the lengths of stay of older adults who resided in nursing homes at the end of life. What they found was that out of the 8,433 study participants who died between 1992 and 2006, 27.3% of resided in a nursing home prior to their death. Most of these patients (70%) actually died in the nursing home without being transferred to another setting like a hospital.

The length of stay data were striking:

the median length of stay in a nursing home before death was 5 months the average length of stay was l…

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