A WAY TO STAY Home Care Yardley Newtown PA

One of the best prescriptions for good senior health is to have the senior citizen adopt a cat or dog as a pet. Provided that the senior is physically and emotionally capable of providing care for one or more pets, research has proven that pets not only have a positive impact on a senior’s longevity but also affects their physical as well as emotional health in a very positive manner. Actress Betty White, a long-time animal rights advocate and pet owner, is a shining example of a senior whose animal companions keep her physically and emotionally active.

 Studies have shown that older adults with a variety of health issues benefit from having ownership of a pet, usually a cat or a dog which can give and receive affection. Seniors with memory problems or slight depression are often more alert and engaged when caring for a companion animal. Just the act of stroking or petting a dog or cat’s fur has proven to lower an individual’s blood pressure. Heart attack victims who return to a home with a pet recover more quickly than others.

 The care of pets requires some regularity of action from their owners and it is this physical activity as well as regular schedule that greatly benefits the health of senior pet owners. A senior who has a hungry dog or cat nudging them awake to be fed or played with isn’t likely to sleep the day away or stay in bed feeling listless or depressed. A pet can provide a senior with a sense of daily purpose, because the animal must be fed several times throughout the day, brushed or groomed on a daily basis as well as taken for a walk in the case of dogs. Any physical activity related to pet ownership helps to extend a senior’s longevity because it helps give them a reason to get out of bed, or get up off the couch or get away from the television set and get moving. Even the simple act of grooming a pet can increase a senior’s blood circulation. Throwing a ball for a dog to retrieve or rolling a ball filled with catnip toward a cat helps to keep the fingers flexible.

 There is another very valuable benefit to any senior citizen who shares his home with a pet companion. Studies have proven that owning a pet provides important companionship to seniors who would otherwise feel alone and disconnected from society. Seniors who have no nearby friends or relatives to communicate with on a regular basis or neighbors to interact with daily can interact instead with their dog or cat, providing some relief from the sense of isolation that they usually experience.

 Although caring for a pet is not an option when a senior citizen is in a nursing home, scheduled visits by dogs trained to provide therapy, have had a noticeably positive effect on the nursing home resident’s mental outlook, as well as providing the same physical benefits such as lowered blood pressure when interacting with the animal. The unconditional love provided by therapy dogs to those confined to a hospital bed or with limited mobility living in a nursing home day in and day out are a much welcome bright spot in the day of anyone.

 Many senior citizens whose health enables them to care for a loving cat or dog in their home or apartment feel that their companion animals serve as a kind of daily emotional tonic that has only positive benefits for both their physical as well as mental well-being.

Home care counselors at A WAY TO STAY Home Care are available to talk with you about your needs.  A WAY TO STAY is a home care agency providing In-Home Care in Yardley.

As people age, they may find they are unable to do everything for themselves as they normally would. Adult children or other family members may try to take on daily tasks in order to help. Family and friends may start giving small amounts of assistance, but this can grow almost daily until it becomes overwhelming, at which point, they begin to realize something more needs to be done. One solution is to seek professional help from an agency that provide non-medical in-home care for older adults.

The decision to hire a home care agency may be met with some resistance, since no-one wants to give up their independence, or feel they are losing control of their daily lives. Many older people will allow a family member to help, but really do not want a stranger to come into their home and “take over.” Professionals understand this, and are normally willing to meet with the caregiver and the older person first, to explain their services and reassure the individual that his or her wishes will be accommodated as much as possible.

Home care agencies provide a variety of services for senior care, and most will work with the person in need of help and the family to create a care plan that meets the needs of the individual, and be within the person’s budget. The elder care plan should provide the proper support while preserving the dignity of the senior, as well as allow as much independence as possible. Even though it may be difficult at first, once the senior care plan is in place and the senior gets to know some of the workers who will come to the home daily or weekly, a transition will happen, and the person will start to look forward to seeing their new caregivers on a regular basis.

Sometimes it is just necessary to have a little help with meal preparation or light housekeeping, long before any personal care is actually needed. That is really the best time to engage a home care agency, when the family members see that their loved one needs more help than they will be able to provide, and before a crisis arises. The home care agency will be willing to start slowly with certain services, and then their help can be increased as it becomes necessary.

In order to be properly informed and to know what to expect from a good in-home care agency, the person or persons who will be in charge of hiring the agency needs to research online, if possible, and be ready to ask the right questions of the agency in consideration.  Below is a suggested list of Essential Questions for you to use. Remember interview a representative from more than one local home care agency in order to find the one that you believe will be the best one to work with.

Essential Questions Sheet (PDF)

Home care counselors at A WAY TO STAY Home Care are available to talk with you about your needs.  A WAY TO STAY is a home care agency providing In-Home Care in Yardley.

Tips From Experts To Help Family Members In Need

More than 7.5 million Americans receive daily home-delivered health care from nearly one million caregivers. Each November, the National Association for Home Care and Hospice (NAHC) celebrates National Home Care and National Hospice Month to honor the men and women who have dedicated their lives to caring for others.

“Helping the elderly while they are in poor health to remain as comfortable and happy as possible in their own home is NAHC’s main goal,” says Val Halamandaris, president of NAHC. “Dedicated people spend their days taking care of those who can no longer care for themselves, making them silent heroes who should be recognized and thanked all year ’round,” he continued.

When you or a loved one become ill or need home care, it can be a very difficult and confusing time for a family. In order to help people make the difficult decision regarding who will care for their loved ones in their final days, NAHC has compiled advice to help family members decide on the right time to consider home care and how to ensure their loved ones are being well provided for. “Signs it is Time to Consider Home Care” and “Questions to Ask When Choosing a Home Care Provider” are vital for those people who must make this vital decision.

Source: Medical News Today

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Home care counselors at A Way to Stay are available to talk with you about your home health care needs including how to reduce caregiver stress while providing better, affordable care. A Way to Stay is a home care agency providing In-Home Care in Yardley.

Here is an interesting article written by Janet Raloff about the expenses and overlooked complications of Diabetes. You can read the excerpt here and the full article at Science News.

Almost one-in-four hospital dollars go to treat people with the metabolic disorder.

Although an estimated 7.8 percent of Americans have been diagnosed with diabetes, patients with this metabolic disease rack up 23 percent of hospital costs nationwide, a new federal analysis finds. Their collective hospital bill in 2008, the most recent year for which data were available: almost $83 billion.

The average hospital stay for someone with diabetes averages roughly a day longer (5.3 days) than in someone free of the disease. And that stay costs about $10,940 — or roughly $2,200 more than the average for people without the disease, according to Taressa Fraze and her colleagues at the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality. Her group has synopsized its findings in an August statistical brief issued by their agency, a division of the Department of Health and Human Services.

Only about one in 14 hospital stays identified diabetes as the primary cause for a patient’s admission. Many people were instead hospitalized for conditions that could — and probably were — fostered by diabetes, such as impaired circulation or heart disease. Or patients may have landed in the hospital with conditions (such as poor wound healing) that had been exacerbated by their disorder.

Indeed, Fraze’s group observes, circulatory disorders — congestive heart failure, hardening of the arteries, heart attacks, nonspecific chest pain and abnormal pacing of heart beats — constitute five of the top 10 reasons for people with diabetes to be hospitalized.

The new analysis finds that people with diabetes also tend to have an average of 2.6 additional and potentially complicating illnesses — twice the number typically seen in people without the disorder. Chief among these additional conditions is high blood pressure, followed by fluid and electrolyte disorders, chronic pulmonary disease, anemia, kidney failure and obesity.

Rates of hospitalization for diabetics differs by income bracket, with the most well-heeled patients being admitted at a rate of 1,762 per 100,000 — a little more than half the rate typical of the poorest diabetics. Hospitalization rates also vary by region, with the highest prevalence in the South and Northeast, and lowest in the West.

Everyone pays the cost of these hospitalizations through tax dollars (for Medicare, which covered 60 percent of diabetics’ hospitalizations in 2008) and higher premiums for private insurance. So it behooves all of us to help fight the development of this disease within our own households (through exercise, weight management and healthy diets) and to encourage it in older at-risk family and friends.

And if someone we know is diagnosed with the disease, we must remind them to remain vigilant so that they can catch complications early. I have an otherwise robust diabetic family member who ignored a tiny toe infection, last year, and ended up hospitalized on and off for the better part of 6 months with IV-antibiotics and near-daily wound treatment.

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September is Healthy Aging Month! You’re never too old to break a sweat and slow down the aging process. Throw those excuses away, and take this advice from WebMD.

Getting Fit For Life

“I don’t have time.”
“I’m too old-I might hurt myself.”
“I’d be too embarrassed at a gym with all those fit young people around.”

Sound familiar? Maybe one of these is the reason you aren’t physically active or exercising. But, in fact, scientists now know that it’s usually more dangerous to not exercise, no matter how old you are. And you don’t need to buy fancy clothes or belong to a gym to become more active.

Most older people don’t get enough physical activity. Here are some reasons why they should:

• Lack of physical activity and not eating the right foods, taken together, are the second greatest underlying cause of death in the United States. (Smoking is the #1 cause.)
• Exercise can help older people feel better and enjoy life more. No one is too old or too out of shape to be more active.
• Regular exercise can prevent or delay some diseases like cancer, heart disease, or diabetes. It can also perk up your mood and help depression, too.
• Being active can help older people to stay independent and able to keep doing things like getting around or dressing themselves.

So, make physical activity a part of your everyday life. Find things you enjoy. Go for brisk walks. Ride a bike. Dance. Work around the house and in the yard. Take care of your garden. Climb stairs. Rake leaves. Do a mix of things that keep you moving and active.

Four Types of Exercise

There are four types of exercises you need to do to have the right mixture of physical activities.

One-Be sure to get at least 30 minutes of activity that makes you breathe harder on most or all days of the week. That’s called “endurance activity,” because it builds your energy or “staying power.” You don’t have to be active for 30 minutes all at once. Ten minutes of endurance activity at a time is fine. Just make sure those 10-minute sessions add up to a total of 30 minutes most days.

How hard do you need to push yourself? One doctor describes the right level of effort this way: If you can talk without any trouble at all, you’re not working hard enough. If you can’t talk at all, it’s too hard.

Two-Keep using your muscles. When muscles aren’t used, they waste away at any age.

How important is it to have “enough” muscle? Very! When you have enough muscle, you can get up from a chair by yourself. When you don’t-you have to wait for someone to help you. When you have enough muscle, you can walk through the park with your grandchildren. When you don’t-you have to stay home. That’s true for younger adults as well as for people age 90 and older.

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For the best in Elder Home Care, please visit A Way to Stay at http://awaytostay.com/.

This is a great article I found written by Gina Kolata. It talks about a new way to predict Alzheimer’s, through one’s spinal fluid. This is exciting research! You can read the excerpt here, and the full article at The New York Times.

Spinal-Fluid Test Is Found to Predict Alzheimer’s

Researchers report that a spinal fluid test can be 100 percent accurate in identifying patients with significant memory loss who are on their way to developing Alzheimer’s disease.

Although there has been increasing evidence of the value of this and other tests in finding signs of Alzheimer’s, the study, which will appear Tuesday in the Archives of Neurology, shows how accurate they can be. The new result is one of a number of remarkable recent findings about Alzheimer’s.

After decades when nothing much seemed to be happening, when this progressive brain disease seemed untreatable and when its diagnosis could be confirmed only at autopsy, the field has suddenly woken up.

Alzheimer’s, medical experts now agree, starts a decade or more before people have symptoms. And by the time there are symptoms, it may be too late to save the brain. So the hope is to find good ways to identify people who are getting the disease, and use those people as subjects in studies to see how long it takes for symptoms to occur and in studies of drugs that may slow or stop the disease.

Researchers are finding simple and accurate ways to detect Alzheimer’s long before there are definite symptoms. In addition to spinal fluid tests they also have new PET scans of the brain that show the telltale amyloid plaques that are a unique feature of the disease. And they are testing hundreds of new drugs that, they hope, might change the course of the relentless brain cell death that robs people of their memories and abilities to think and reason.

“This is what everyone is looking for, the bull’s-eye of perfect predictive accuracy,” Dr. Steven DeKosky, dean of the University of Virginia medical school, who is not connected to the new research, said about the spinal tap study.

Dr. John Morris, a professor of neurology at Washington University, said the new study “establishes that there is a signature of Alzheimer’s and that it means something. It is very powerful.”

A lot of work lies ahead, researchers say — making sure the tests are reliable if they are used in doctors’ offices, making sure the research findings hold up in real-life situations, getting doctors and patients comfortable with the notion of spinal taps, the method used to get spinal fluid. But they see a bright future.

Although the latest PET scans for Alzheimer’s are not commercially available, the spinal fluid tests are.

So the new results also give rise to a difficult question: Should doctors offer, or patients accept, commercially available spinal tap tests to find a disease that is yet untreatable? In the research studies, patients are often not told they may have the disease, but in practice in the real world, many may be told.

Some medical experts say it should be up to doctors and their patients. Others say doctors should refrain from using the spinal fluid test in their practices. They note that it is not reliable enough — results can vary by lab — and has been studied only in research settings where patients are carefully selected to have no other conditions, like strokes or depression, that could affect their memories.

“This is literally on the cutting edge of where the field is,” Dr. DeKosky said. “The field is moving fast. You can get a test that is approved by the F.D.A., and cutting edge doctors will use it.”

But, said Dr. John Trojanowski, a University of Pennsylvania researcher and senior author of the paper, given that people can get the test now, “How early do you want to label people?”

Some, like Dr. John Growdon, a neurology professor at Massachusetts General Hospital who wrote an editorial accompanying the paper, said that decision was up to doctors and their patients.

Sometimes patients with severe memory loss do not have the disease. Doctors might want to use the test in cases where they want to be sure of the diagnosis. And they might want to offer the test to people with milder symptoms who want to know whether they are developing the devastating brain disease.

One drawback, though, is that spinal fluid is obtained with a spinal tap, and that procedure, with its reputation for pain and headaches, makes most doctors and many patients nervous. The procedure involves putting a needle in the spinal space and withdrawing a small amount of fluid.

Seven Health Care Changes You Might Have Missed

By:  Mary Agnes Carey and Andrew Villegas

KHN Staff Writers

This is a great article that I found that lists the many changes in our health care system, and what you can expect. Please read this excerpt and continue reading the full article at http://www.kaiserhealthnews.org/Stories/2010/July/09/health-overhaul-changes.aspx.

You’ve probably heard that the new health overhaul law this year will provide an option for young adults to stay on their parents’ health plans and set up insurance pools for people with pre-existing medical conditions who can’t find insurance. But several lesser-known provisions also take effect in coming months that could have a lasting impact on the nation’s health care system.

These provisions include eliminating patients’ co-payments for certain preventive services such as mammograms, giving the government more power to review health insurers’ premium increases and allowing states to expand Medicaid coverage to low-income adults without children.

While these changes might not have gotten at lot of attention, they could help build support for the law in the run-up to the contentious mid-term elections. Here’s a quick look at some of the changes occurring this year:

Prevention For Less

What: Insurers won’t be able to charge co-payments or deductibles for certain preventive services such as breast cancer screenings every one to two years, cholesterol blood tests and some sexually transmitted disease screenings. Insurers will also have to cover recommended immunizations at no cost to patients. Some health care analysts have suggested that premiums may rise as a result of this and other new requirements, but administration officials say any increase in premiums would be miniscule.

When: The change takes effect Sept. 23, which means it applies to plan years that begin after that. For many plans, their new year begins after Jan. 1.

Status: The Department of Health and Human Services says regulations are on their way. Paul Bonta, associate executive director for policy and government affairs at the American College of Preventive Medicine, predicts manufacturers of vaccines and diagnostic tests will push for their products to be labeled preventive services in a bid to have them covered at no cost to consumers.

Knowing Which Treatments Work Best

What: A nonprofit research institute will examine various medical treatments — by looking at data and conducting its own studies — to determine which methods work best. This is often called “comparative effectiveness research.”

When: The comptroller general of the United States — who runs the Government Accountability Office — will appoint the 17 members of the institute’s board of governors, which will oversee the institute’s operations.

Status: Everything about this institute, from its board members to its findings about treatments, is likely to generate great interest and potential controversy. The law says the board’s findings can’t be interpreted as requiring how doctors practice medicine or what insurers cover. However, in the quest to control health care costs, employers, insurers and others may point to such data as rationales for changes in coverage and treatment patterns.

…continue reading here.

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Summer Tips for Elderly: Stay in Air Conditioning, Drink Plenty of Water

Summer can be dangerous for elderly and frail individuals, who are especially prone to heat-related injuries. But taking certain precautions can reduce these risks.

The elderly are less able to adapt to hot weather, and typically have a reduced “thirst reflex” that can prevent them from drinking adequate amounts of water, according to Dr. Thomas Cavalieri, founder of the New Jersey Institute for Successful Aging. The elderly should not be left in un-air-conditioned spaces for too long, and should be checked twice daily for signs of heat exhaustion or heat stroke, he and other researchers suggest.

…continue reading HERE.

Cataract Awareness

About 20.5 million Americans age 40 and older have cataracts. More than half of all Americans develop cataracts by age 80.

Cataracts cloud the eye’s clear lens, similar to a window that is “fogged” with steam. When the lens becomes cloudy, light rays cannot pass through it easily and vision becomes blurry. Cataracts are not a growth or a film over the eye.

Cataracts start out mildly and have little effect on vision at first. But as the cataract becomes denser, so does the impact on vision. See your Eye M.D. if you experience:

• Painless blurring of vision

• Sensitivity to light and glare

• Double vision in one eye

• Poor night vision

• Fading or yellowing of colors

• Frequent changes in glasses or contact lens prescriptions

Although cataracts usually develop as part of the aging process, they can also result from:

• Eye injuries

• Certain diseases, such as diabetes

• Genetic inheritance

• Certain medications

• Frequent, unprotected exposure to UV-A and UV-B rays

• Smoking

…continue reading HERE.

How do you know when you’re getting older?

(ARA) – The signs of aging aren’t always as obvious as a few more wrinkles and grey hairs. The body naturally changes as you get older, but what exactly can you expect and how do you make sure you’re aging in a healthy way?

The experts at Mayo Clinic offer a list of things to look for as you age, and tips on how you can stay healthy:

Heart

As you get older, your heart must work harder to pump the same amount of blood through your body. Your blood vessels may narrow if hardened deposits of fat have formed on your arteries. This can lead to high blood pressure (hypertension).

You can help prevent high blood pressure by maintaining a healthy weight, exercising regularly and reducing your salt intake.

Muscles, Joints and Bones

Your bones shrink in size and density as you age, which makes you susceptible to fracture. Your muscles and joints also lose some flexibility and strength.

To help your body stay flexible and to keep your bones strong, get the recommended daily amount of vitamin D and calcium and engage in weight-bearing exercises like walking, climbing stairs and light weight training.

Eyes

Experienced eyes have thinner retinas with lenses that are less clear. Focusing on objects close up may become more difficult and you may be sensitive to glaring lights, particularly when driving at night. Common eye conditions include glaucoma and cataracts.

Eat a healthy diet full of fruits, vegetables and whole grains and get regular eye exams to help catch any problems early.

Ears

Hearing loss is one of the most common conditions reported in aging adults. The thickening of eardrums can cause you to have difficulty hearing high frequencies and you may notice an increase in ear wax.

Avoid prolonged exposure to loud noises and wear hearing protection when doing noisy tasks like mowing the lawn. Have your hearing checked regularly.

If you’ve got health concerns or questions about what you can expect as you get older, a great resource to have on hand is the Mayo Clinic Family Health Book, 4th edition. You’ll have great information at your fingertips including:

* Preventive screening recommendations and tests to consider based on your age

* Hundreds of pages of fully updated information on diseases and conditions

* How to protect yourself and prepare for flu pandemics

* How to make sense of your symptoms

* A medication guide

Also included is general information designed to help you navigate the changes and health care decisions that come as we get older.

Courtesy of ARAcontent