World leaders have committed to the prevention and treatment of Alzheimer's Disease by 2025, but contemporary drug development is often slow. In this post, Dr. Jeffrey Cummings draws from his recent review in Alzheimer’s Research & Therapy to discuss how likely success will be, and suggests ways to make it more likely that this ambitious target will be met.
What to Do When Alzheimer’s Threatens to Tear Your Family Apart
Having a family member with Alzheimer’s disease is a stressful situation. According to the Alzheimer’s Association, “Dealing with Alzheimer’s can bring out many strong emotions. As the disease progresses caregiving issues can often ignite or magnify [existing] family conflicts.”
Carole Larkin (personal interview), a certified dementia consultant in Dallas, estimates that 30% of her clients have conflict among family members. She says you can double that for blended families.
Why Trump and Clinton Are Proposing Benefits for Family Caregivers
Both Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton have proposed new benefits for Americans who take care of elderly relatives—and new data shows how big a pocketbook issue this is for many families.
More than 40% of family caregivers spend $5,000 or more of their own money each year on food, clothing, transportation, medical care and other costs for their aging loved ones, according to a study released Monday by Caring.com.
NIA boosts Alzheimer’s research network with two new centers
The National Institute on Aging (NIA) at NIH is pleased to announce two new additions to its Alzheimer’s Disease Centers Program—a network of researchers and clinicians developing and sharing new approaches and findings to speed discovery in dementia research. The Michigan Alzheimer’s Disease Core Center (ADCC) in Ann Arbor, Michigan and Wake Forest ADCC in Winston Salem, North Carolina—each to receive an estimated $9 million over the next five years—will boost the NIH-funded research network to 31 centers nationwide.
Relief may be on the horizon for the Sandwich Generation if elder-care leave catches on
If this is the beginning of a trend, the Sandwich Generation can heave a sigh of relief. Under pressure to care both for their children and for their aging parents, most working professionals feel demands on both their on time and resources. And looks like their complaints are finally being heard.
In what supporters hope could be the start of a trend, professional-services firm Deloitte has said that its employees will receive additional benefits — up to 16 weeks of fully paid leave to care for and spend time with family members — this includes time to tend to spouses, children beyond infancy and aging parents. Also under this family leave program, mothers are eligible for up to six months of paid time off when factoring in short-term disability for childbirth.
My sister made her end-of-life wishes clear. Then dementia took hold
Before my sister was struck by frontotemporal dementia, her wishes were very clear.
No feeding tube or breathing machine if she became profoundly incapacitated, without the prospect of recovery. No aggressive life-sustaining measures.
And she wanted to stay in her home, all the way through.
But that was then, when the prospect of becoming infirm was abstract. When illness descended, my sister changed. And I found myself wondering whose wishes we should respect. My sister, as she had been? Or my sister, as she was now?
The Three Biggest Mistakes Caregivers Make
In the seven years that my wife and I served as caregivers to her mother, we made many mistakes. Some of those I know were detrimental to my mother-in-law and some to the whole family. For example, we moved her 4 times in that short period: to a retirement community, then to an apartment, then to a long term care facility near us, and then to another facility that provided better care at a lower price that was near my wife’s sister.
Donald Trump's Plan To Support Family Caregivers
Early in the presidential campaign, Hillary Clinton proposed a package of ideas aimed at helping adult children who care for aging parents and other relatives. Yesterday, Donald Trump embraced a similar idea. Family caregiving, it seems, is going mainstream.
It is striking that both Clinton and Trump are talking about an issue that until now has flown far below the political radar. Best I can tell, this is the first time any major party candidate for president, let alone both, has proposed ways to help caregivers.
A Salute to America’s Elder Care Workers
Back in April, at the Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, N.J., a motley group of social scientists, researchers, artists and activists convened to discuss the value of the work of our nation’s “maintainers.” They’re the unheralded bunch who don’t get showered with attention as innovators (think Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg) do.
To make his point, Lee Vinsel, a conference organizer and an assistant professor at Stevens, argued that the world needs more Mary Poppins. The famed nanny’s story, Vinsel believes, “asserts that the most important thing in life is an ethics of care, that we can only see the world with clear eyes if we choose to value one another, and that an essential way of doing this is by undertaking underappreciated and undervalued mundane, ordinary labor.”
Why CMS Should Reward Agencies for ‘Family Centered’ Home Health
Recognizing and supporting the role of family caregivers may be a way home health agencies can strengthen the current concerning state of care for older adults in the United States, according to a recent report from The National Academics of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine. This should include revising Medicare to provide more reimbursement for involving family caregivers, the report authors assert.
The 297-page report, Families Caring for an Aging America, was compiled over the last two years and released today with support from 15 sponsors by an expert committee from The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine.
The National Family Caregiver Support Program: Recognizing Family Caregivers as Consumers in Their Own Right
A recent study on the pioneering National Family Caregiver Support Program finds that over the past 15 years, the program has accelerated the development of local services and supports to help caregiving families. This is good news; before the NFCSP became law, only half the states reported providing respite care — one of the most pressing needs of families and friends who take on the caregiving role. That has begun to change, although greater progress needs to be made.
Preventing Alzheimer’s Disease Is Easier Than You Think
Do you have Insulin Resistance?
If you don’t know, you’re not alone. This is perhaps the single most important question any of us can ask about our physical and mental health—yet most patients, and even many doctors, don’t know how to answer it.
Here in the U.S., insulin resistance has reached epidemic proportions: more than half of us are now insulin resistant. Insulin resistance is a hormonal condition that sets the stage throughout the body for inflammation and overgrowth, disrupts normal cholesterol and fat metabolism, and gradually destroys our ability to process carbohydrates.