Heat Takes a Toll on Seniors

Nobody likes extreme and prolonged heat, but such conditions can be deadly for seniors.  On average, more than 1,500 people in the U.S. die each year from excessive heat, according to NOAA National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA This number is greater than the 30-year mean annual number of deaths due to tornadoes, hurricanes, floods and lightning combined. 

 

 

The elderly are often the most vulnerable to severe heat, according to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) (http://www.bt.cdc.gov/disasters/extremeheat/elderlyheat.asp).  Why? Their bodies do not adjust as well as young people to sudden changes in temperature, they are more likely to have a chronic medical condition that changes normal body responses to heat, and they are often on a prescription medicine that impairs the body's ability to regulate its temperature or that inhibits perspiration.

If you are a senior or caring for an elderly individual, the following tips will help them combat the heat:

 

• Keep a glass of water in every room to quickly and easily access fluids. Drink plenty of fluids, even if you don’t feel thirsty.

 

• Go through the closet and remove all heavy materials, long sleeves and dark colors. Store them until fall.

 

• Set fashion trends. If you’re in need of new clothes, check out the latest fashion magazines. Look for short sleeves, lightweight rayons or cottons, and light-colored clothing that reflect the heat.

 

• Stay out of the sun during the hottest times of the day. Fill up your bird feeder in the morning and water the lawn at night. Sunburn makes the job of heat dissipation that much more difficult.

 

• Put down that broom! Save household chores, particularly washing and drying clothes and operating the dishwasher, for evenings, when the weather is cooler.

 

• Take a nap during high heat times – between 3 and 5 p.m. in the afternoon, for instance – or find a good television program or movie to watch.

 

• While you’re napping or enjoying a movie, keep shades down and blinds pulled.  Keeping a house tightly closed is more energy efficient.

 

• Invite your friends over for an iced tea break. Replace coffee breaks with iced tea or lemonade breaks in an air-conditioned spot – not the patio. Staying in an air-conditioned dwelling during hot days is safer.

 

• Go on a shopping spree. If you don’t have an air conditioner, or if yours is broken, spend the afternoon at the mall. You can shop or just enjoy cool drinks and a good book.

 

• Put away that meat loaf recipe for the summer and track down new recipes for fruit and vegetable salads. Foods like proteins that increase metabolic heat production also increase water loss.

 

• If increased use of a central air conditioning system causes higher utility bills that are a problem for your budget, consider purchasing a fan or small window unit that can cool down a home at a lower cost. In fact, window fans provide an effective way to exhaust the day’s hot air during the night.  

 

For more information about the heat, visit the National Weather Service Web site at http://www.noaa.gov and the Federal Emergency Management Agency Web site at www.fema.gov.

Longevity Genes Protect From Cancer, Research Reveals

Good news on the longevity front. Recent research has found that if you have a mother older than 91 and a father older than 87, they likely have passed on genes to you that could significantly reduce your chance of getting cancer and other common diseases associated with aging.

An international collaboration has discovered that people in the U.S. who had a long-lived mother or father were 24 percent less likely to get cancer.

The scientists classified long-lived mothers as those who survived past 91 years old, and compared them to those who reached average age spans of 77 to 91. Long-lived fathers lived past 87 years old, compared with the average of 65 to 87 years. The scientists studied 938 new cases of cancer that developed during the 18-year follow-up period.

Researchers found that overall mortality rates dropped by up to 19 percent for each decade that at least one of the parents lived past the age of 65.

In the study, published in the Journals of Gerontology: Series A (The Oxford Journals), the scientists analyzed data from a series of interviews conducted with 9,764 people taking part in the Health and Retirement Study. The participants were based in America, and were followed up over 18 years, from 1992 to 2010.

“Previous studies have shown that the children of centenarians tend to live longer with less heart disease, but this is the first robust evidence that the children of longer-lived parents are also less likely to get cancer,” according to Professor William Henley, from the University of Exeter Medical School. “We also found that they are less prone to diabetes or suffering a stroke.”

Welcome research for you, but that still leaves the dilemma of how to care for your parents. It is possible for your mom and dad to continue to remain at home, with a little extra help. Learn more about at-home services for seniors by contacting your local Home Instead Senior Care^® office.

For more information about Home Instead Senior Care^®, contact Home Instead Senior Care at 570-586-3135 or go to HomeInstead.com/nepa.

 

 For more about this study, go to http://biomedgerontology.oxfordjournals.org/content/early/2013/05/16/gerona.glt061.abstract.

New Social Security Service Target of Scammers

For those who receive benefits or have Medicare, “my Social Security” can help check estimates of your retirement, disability and survivor’s benefits, your earnings record, and the estimated Social Security and Medicare taxes you’ve paid.

However, you should be suspicious of any emails sent to you.

The my Social Security account is a recently released new service for the public, but the agency is not sending emails to generate enrollment. To open one of these personal accounts, citizens should go directly to my Social Security at http://www.ssa.gov/myaccount/. If you receive an email inviting you to join, do not click any links.

Criminals are using "phishing" emails encouraging senior citizens to create an account. Rest assured, any email promoting this are not coming from the agency, according to information from the Social Security Administration.

Here’s how to detect a fraudulent email message:

·         Any email coming from Social Security will come from an email address ending in “.gov”, although you should not trust the “From” address, since attackers can spoof this address.

·         Any email coming from Social Security will not have email addresses associated with private companies such as Yahoo, Hotmail, Gmail, etc.

·         Look for poor word choice, phrasing, spelling or extra words that are not needed in the text.

·         Links to Social Security websites will always begin with http://www.socialsecurity.gov/ or https://secure.ssa.gov/ (the slash after ".gov" is important). For example, you should not trust a link that looks like this: http://www.socialsecurity.gov.bx.co.rx/setup. If you are suspicious of a link in an email, use your mouse to “hover over” the link to see the web address.

 

Please note: Members of the public who receive phishing emails should forward them to the U.S. Computer Emergency Readiness Team at phishing-report@us-cert.gov.

To create an account on my Social Security, you must provide some personal information about yourself and give answers to some questions that only you are likely to know. Next, you create a username and password that you will use to access your online account. This process protects you and keeps your personal Social Security information private. Scammers are developing new ways every day to defraud seniors of their hard-earned money. To learn more about the Home Instead Senior Care network’s Protect Seniors from Fraud^SM program, go to ProtectSeniorsFromFraud.com.

Driving with Pets Not a Good Idea

Seniors who regularly put their dog in the car whenever they drive are increasing their risk for being involved in a vehicle collision, say University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) researchers. They say both overall and at-fault crash rates for drivers 70 years of age or older were higher for those whose pet typically rode with them.

 “This is the first study to evaluate the presence of pets in a vehicle as a potential internal distraction for elderly drivers,” said Gerald McGwin, Ph.D., a professor in the Departments of Epidemiology, Ophthalmology and Surgery and senior author of the study.

The study was published in Accident Analysis and Prevention. Distracted driving has become a focal point for the National Highway Safety Traffic Administration and is defined as anything that could potentially remove a driver’s eyes from the road, their hands from the steering wheel or their concentration from the task of driving.

The study, conducted in the Clinical Research Unit in the UAB Department of Ophthalmology, enrolled 2,000 community-dwelling (those who do not live in assisted living or nursing homes) licensed drivers age 70 and older, of whom 691 had pets.

The crash risk for drivers who always drove with their pets was double that of drivers who never drove with a pet, while crash rates for those who sometimes or rarely drove with pets were consistent with the rates for non-pet owners.

More than half the pet owners said they took their pet with them in the car at least occasionally, usually riding on the front passenger seat or in the back seat.