Volunteers needed to help make holidays merry for local seniors - News - The Times-Tribune

BY COLLEEN DAY (STAFF WRITER)
Published: November 11, 2013

A local group is looking for some help to make the holidays merry for lonely seniors.

The Be a Santa to a Senior program, sponsored by Home Instead Senior Care, collects, wraps and delivers Christmas presents to senior citizens who might be overlooked during the holidays.

Home Instead Senior Care teamed up with other local groups, including Meals on Wheels, Serving Seniors, Compassionate Care Hospice and Oakwood Terrace, to identify financially needy or isolated seniors. The program also receives support from Geisinger Community Medical Center, Gertrude Hawk Chocolates and Keystone College.

Christmas trees featuring paper ornaments with seniors' first names and their gift requests will be set up today in locations throughout the county, including the Abington Community Library, GCMC, the Carbondale Peebles and the Wal-Mart and Marshalls in Dickson City.

Shoppers can pick up a paper ornament, buy the requested gift and return the unwrapped present, with the ornament attached, to the participating location. Gifts will be collected through Dec. 9.

Terry Wise, associate professor of sports management at Keystone College, said the college became involved in the program several years ago when a student worked with Home Instead Senior Care for her senior project.

"She loved the program, but she said that what was holding it back was that they had no place to wrap all of the presents they collect," Ms. Wise said. "She wanted to bring the program on campus."

Keystone College now supports the program by giving volunteers a place to wrap the presents. This year's gift wrap party is scheduled Dec. 10 from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m.

"It's important that students are involved in the community. They need to give back and know that everyone is not as fortunate as they are," Ms. Wise said. "It's important for them to look outside of the microcosm of the college, see what's going on their community and get involved."

Jessica Engel, marketing and sales manager at Home Instead Senior Care and Be a Santa to a Senior coordinator, said the program began about 10 years ago as a way to ensure senior citizens do not spend the holiday season alone.

"People of all ages love the holidays," Ms. Engel said. "The gift is in the present, but it's also in having that connection and interaction with someone else. That is the gift for them. We have so many seniors in this area, and many of them are isolated."

Last year the program reached out to more than 800 seniors and ended up with about double that in presents.

"Everyone always gets a present. No senior on our list ever goes without. What we see is a lot of people buy not only what is on the ornament, but also a little something extra," Ms. Engel said

For more information on the program, visit BeaSantatoaSenior.com or call 570-687-4755.

Contact the writer: cday@timesshamrock.com

Volunteers needed to help make holidays merry for local seniors - News - The Times-Tribune

Increase in use of meal delivery programs could reduce LTC facility admissions

October 14, 2013 by Lois A. Bowers, Senior Editor of Long Term Living

Long-term care facilities could see fewer new residents, but states could save money by expanding meal-delivery programs that enable some seniors to stay in their homes longer or avoid moving altogether, according to a new study by Brown University investigators.
The public health researchers analyzed state, Medicaid and nursing home data to project that if each of the contiguous states expanded by one percent the percentage of senior citizens receiving delivered meals, then 1,722 more Medicaid recipients would avoid living in a long-term care facility. Twenty-six states would realize a net annual savings from expanding their programs, whereas 22 would end up spending more. In every state, however, more "low-needs" seniors would be able to remain in their homes regardless of whether their care is paid for by Medicaid.

Across the country, the one percent expansion would bring meals to 392,594 more seniors at a cost of more than $117 million, the researchers say. Because 1,722 seniors would no longer need to live in nursing homes on Medicaid, total Medicaid savings would total $109 million, they add. The additional food delivery costs outstrip Medicaid savings nationwide, even though most states would save money on a net basis, because in some very large states with relatively few low-care seniors or relatively low Medicaid per diems, food costs outweighed the resulting Medicaid savings on a relatively large scale.

Study lead author Kali Thomas, PhD, assistant professor in Brown’s School of Public Health, said the findings provide guidance for state policymakers as they consider the future of their home-delivered meals programs, which are conducted under the Older Americans Act. States projected to lose money can opt to focus their efforts in ways that are more precise than an across-the-board expansion, she adds.

“We’re not proposing that all states simply increase the proportion of age-65-plus receiving meals by one percent,” Thomas says. “But if they were to target these vulnerable people who are at risk for nursing home placement, they would likely see more savings. This is a program that has the potential to save states a lot of money if it’s done correctly.”
Policymakers should consider not only the fiscal implications of providing home-delivered meals, which the study quantifies, but also the impact on individual seniors, says Thomas, who adds that she has seen the benefits anecdotally as a Meals on Wheels volunteer in Rhode Island.

The National Institute on Aging and the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality funded the research, which is published in the October issue of Health Affairs.

Living with Alzheimer’s: A Journey of Caring

As part of World Alzheimer’s Month, Home Instead Senior Care and Alzheimer’s Disease International (ADI) will co-host three roundtable events around the world to address the need for support for family members who care for those with Alzheimer’s disease and other dementias.

Roger Baumgart, Jeff Huber and Dave Banark will be representing Home Instead Senior Care at these events called Living with Alzheimer’s: A Journey of Caring in Washington D.C (Sept. 19), London (Sept. 20), and Beijing (Sept. 26).

Each panel of prestigious Alzheimer’s experts – including influential healthcare professionals, nonprofit organizations, government officials, opinion leaders and family caregivers – will be moderated by noted international journalists.  We encourage you to follow the discussion on Twitter and Facebook using #Alztalk2013.

The events will be moderated by:

o   Barry Petersen, Emmy Award-wining CBS Correspondent, Author of Jan’s Story about his late wife’s struggle with Alzheimer’s (North America)

o   Fergus Walsh, BBC Medical Correspondent (Europe)

o   Professor  Luning Wang, President, Alzheimer’s Disease China (Asia)

Panel members for the Living with Alzheimer’s: A Journey of Caring event include:

o   Marc Wortmann, Executive Director, Alzheimer’s Disease International

o   George Vradenburg, Chairman of USAgainstAlzheimer's

o   Dr. Robert Yeoh, former president Alzheimer’s Australia

o   Professor Angela Leung, Hong Kong University

o   Dr. David Saucedo, esteemed Alzheimer’s physician/researcher in Mexico

o   Dr. David Hilfiker, retired physician with Alzheimer’s, blogger recently featured in Mashable

o   Linda Lawrence, family caregiver from Canada

o    Dr. Alexander Sandy Halperin, Alumni Member of the National Alzheimer's Association Early Stage Advisory Group --- Alzheimer's Advocate; former dentist with Alzheimer’s

o    Karen Garner, Blogger, caregiver to husband with Younger Onset Alzheimer’s

o    Deb Cohen, Ph.D., Senior Vice President, Knowledge Development for the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM)

o    Anne Connelly, Aging Well Network in Ireland

o    Dr.  Hans Groth, World Demographic & Ageing Forum

o    Professor Martin Prince, King’s College

Older Adults Willing to Change Lifestyle to Avoid Fracture

A new study has found that older patients who know they are at risk of fractures will make positive lifestyle changes to avoid them, such as exercising, wearing proper footwear and taking supplements.

The findings are important, according to Dr. Joanna Sale, a researcher at St. Michael's Hospital, Toronto, and lead author of the study. She says much previous research in bone health has focused on medications or found that people make negative lifestyle changes such as reducing housework or leisure activities because they are afraid of falling.

Half of all women over the age of 50 and one in five men over 50 will have a fracture after falling from standing height or lower. Having one such fracture doubles a person's risk of having another. Dr. Sale, a clinical epidemiologist, said her research was aimed at finding ways to prevent those repeat fractures, particularly hip fractures, because about half of all hip fracture patients die or end up in long-term care facilities. Dr. Sale's study, published online in the journal Osteoporosis International, looked at patients over 65 who participated in the Osteoporosis Exemplary Care Program at St. Michael's Fracture Clinic.

Research participants were interviewed about their perceived fracture risk, recommendations they received about their bone health, results of bone density tests and any lifestyle or behavioral changes they made since their last fracture. Many said they didn't want to think about the possibility of a future fracture and felt they had little control over risk factors such as age – yet they all engaged in a number of daily behavioral strategies to manage their fracture risk. Most were concerned about being careful, such as using handrails or wearing proper shoes.

Faster Parkinson’s Detection Could Lead to Better Control

Parkinson’s disease is a neurological disorder that affects a half million people in the United States, with about 50,000 newly diagnosed cases each year. And, it normally strikes those past age 60.

Shaky hands, tremors, rigid muscles, slower movements are all the symptoms most often associated with Parkinson’s disease.

There is no cure and, until now, no reliable method for detecting the disease. An encouraging glimmer of hope exists, though. A research team from Michigan State has developed an innovative detection method they say is a major breakthrough in diagnosing Parkinson’s in early stages – the point at which treatment to control symptoms is most effective.

The method of detection, developed in part by Rahul Shrivastav, professor and chair of MSU’s Department of Communicative Sciences and Disorders, involves monitoring a patient’s speech patterns, specifically movement patterns of the tongue and jaw. Shrivastav says Parkinson’s affects all patients’ speech and changes in speech patterns are detectable before other movement and muscles are affected by the disease.

The new early detection method has proved to be more than 90 percent effective and is noninvasive and inexpensive. Requiring as little as two seconds of speech, monitoring can be done remotely and in telemedicine applications. Since there is no cure for Parkinson’s disease, early detection is particularly important because the treatments currently available for controlling symptoms are most effective at that stage.

Shrivastav hopes that by designing tools to capture those changes, which are very small, inaudible changes, neurologists and other health care providers will have a way to make a diagnostic decision that isn’t possible otherwise.

For more about this study, visit http://msutoday.msu.edu/360/2013/detecting-parkinsons-for-better-treatment/.

Binge Drinking Tied to Insomnia, Study Reveals

A new study finds that for older people there appears to be a clear link between binge drinking and insomnia. Researchers found adults ages 55 and older who binged on average more than two days a week had an 84 percent greater odds of reporting an insomnia symptom compared with non-binge drinkers.

According to the authors, this is the first study to their knowledge that examines binge drinking (four or more drinks) and its association with insomnia symptoms in older adults.

Results show that overall, 26.2 percent of participants had two or less binge drinking days per week, on average, and 3.1 percent had more than two days per week, on average. Adjustment for demographic variables, medical conditions, and elevated depressive symptoms were made for participants.

“It was somewhat surprising that frequent binge drinking (more than two binge drinking days per week, on average), but not occasional binge drinking (less than two binge drinking days per week, on average) had a significant association with self-reported insomnia symptoms,” said lead author Sarah Canham, Ph.D., postdoctoral fellow in Drug Dependence Epidemiology, John Hopkins University, Bloomberg School of Public Health, Department of Mental Health in Baltimore, Md.

Insomnia is not the only risk. This report comes on the heels of 2012 research, which found that adults 65 and older who binge drink at least twice a month are two-and-a-half times more likely to suffer cognitive and memory declines, compared with seniors who don’t binge drink, according to research presented at the Alzheimer’s Association International Conference.

For more about binge drinking, visit http://www.drugfree.org/join-together/alcohol/seniors-who-binge-drink-more-likely-to-suffer-cognitive-decline.

New Report: Seniors Vulnerable to Extreme Heat

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are urging people – senior citizens in particular – to prepare themselves for the extreme heat of summer after releasing a report showing the U.S. averages 658 deaths a year from this heat. That’s more deaths than from tornadoes, hurricanes, floods and lightning combined. In this new report, more than two-thirds of the deaths (69 percent) occurred at home, and 91 percent of those homes lacked air conditioning. Most of those who died were unmarried or living alone, and 72 percent were male.

“Taking common sense steps in extreme temperatures can prevent heat-related illnesses and deaths,” says Robin Ikeda, MD, MPH, acting director of the National Center for Environmental Health and Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry. The CDC is urging Americans to stay cool, hydrated and informed. Extreme heat affects everyone, but the elderly, children, the poor or homeless, persons who work or exercise outdoors, and those with chronic medical conditions are most at risk.

Extreme heat can lead to very high body temperatures, brain and organ damage, and even death. People suffer heat-related illness when their bodies are unable to compensate and cool themselves properly.

A study released recently in CDC’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report found that 7,233 heat-related deaths occurred in the United States from 1999 to 2009. And, an analysis of 2012 data indicates that deaths are on the rise. In a two-week period in 2012, excessive heat exposure resulted in 32 deaths in four states – four times the typical average for those states for the same two-week period from 1999-2009.

http://www.cdc.gov/extremeheat/seniors.html