According to researchers, older adults, their doctors, and their family members together all avoid the conversation about senior driving safety, putting it off for as long as possible. Studies have found that physicians are usually the ones to bring up driving with their elderly patients, but usually only after significant events, like a change in health that massively affected driving, a safety concern reported by a family member, or an obvious red flag like a crash.
Inflammation is a normal, healthy biological response, which helps rid your body of harmful bacterias, toxins, viruses and damaged cells. In the case of acute inflammation, like when you have a cut or you’re dealing with a cold, the process usually only lasts a few hours or a few days. Unfortunately, several factors can interfere with this natural healing system of your body, sending it into overdrive, stimulating it too much and hindering the healing process to cause damage to your body.
With the winter holidays rapidly approaching, stress goes hand in hand with every aspect of them. The anxiety of planning, getting the house and travel arrangements ready, seeing sometimes challenging family members, and the financial pressure of gift shopping can take a lot out of most anyone. But fortunately, it doesn’t have to be.
Seniors may travel for all sorts of reasons. With having more free time in retirement, there’s plenty of time now to explore the world around us. Either to visit relatives, see exotic or domestic locales on their bucket lists, or something else, there are things seniors can do to make their travel experience easier on them.
Changes in the appearance, growth, and strength of a person’s fingernails can sometimes tell us a great deal about their overall health. If you spot a change or markedly different appearance in the nails of your elderly loved one, it could clue you in on a serious medical condition. Read on to find out what health conditions different nail appearances could point to.
For many caregivers and family members of older adults, one of the most consistent and biggest challenges is keeping their senior loved one maintaining a healthy weight. Among the many changes that aging brings about, our senses of smell and taste weaken, which can cause appetite and food preferences to change. Many seniors aren’t very excited for meal times and struggle to eat enough to satisfy their daily nutritional requirements. Proper nutrition is critical for good health, as our body is composed of the things we feed it.
If you’re working as a caregiver, oftentimes you have access to a senior that their friends, family, and other loved ones do not. Because of this, you may be able to spot things and warning signs that may be hidden or otherwise fly under the radar from them, allowing you to oftentimes be their first line of defense. Especially considering that as a caregiver, you will see them in some of their most vulnerable moments.
When your sleep is poor, not only does the daytime tiredness affect your ability to do activities throughout the day safely and enjoyably, but poor sleep has been linked with a lower quality of life, and risk of chronic disease. For people with bad sleep habits, conditions like diabetes and obesity are more common. Surprisingly, sleep regulates the hormones that tell your body when you’re hungry and signals the feeling of fullness that makes you stop eating. For those suffering from bad sleep, they may be prompted to eat more, and also reach for unhealthy food choices throughout the day.
While much attention was paid to the shots from the COVID-19 vaccine this year, and necessarily so, it is critical that we do not forget about the equally important, especially for older adults, seasonal vaccine against influenza, or the “flu”.
Alzheimer’s and other diseases of dementia are, naturally, a great concern for many people as they age. The idea of living on, but being unable to mentally function, or in the most tragic cases, remember who you or your loved ones are or even be able to hold a conversation is an incredibly frightening prospect.
Thanksgiving is one of the cornerstone holidays of America, a feast celebrating family and togetherness, upon which one of the foundational tales of our country rests. While everyone certainly enjoys good food, a cozy atmosphere, and seeing friends, family, and other loved ones, the amount of stress, travel, effort, and planning that goes into the holiday can be a great source of negativity for some, ruining their enjoyment or perhaps making them come out the other end with a bad taste in their mouths, no matter how many helpings of pumpkin pie they have.
As we age, it’s important to know about all the changes we can make to preserve our health and longevity. After all, your body isn’t necessarily capable of all the same things it was when you were younger, so it doesn’t exactly make sense to keep living your life the same way you did at that time. By keeping preventable health problems in mind, knowing what you can do for early detection and treatment, men can preserve their health long into their advanced years.
As vaccination rates increase and COVID-19 infections decrease, we are perhaps well on our way to seeing an end of the pandemic that disrupted so much of our daily lives, routines, and activities we enjoyed. While getting infected with the disease had worse health results for seniors, the impact of spending eighteen sedentary months inside socially isolating and physically distancing has the possibility of nearly as bad health incomes.
While many seniors are planning to spend their twilight years of life living in their own home and maintaining their independence, the unfortunate reality is that the challenges that come from the changes that aging brings to the body can make even the most warm and inviting home into a place fraught with dangers and terrors. The good news is that it doesn’t have to be this way. With a few simple changes to the home, and some new strategies for living inside of it, you can make sure your older adult loved ones are set up for success and can stay living and thriving in their own home well into their advanced years.
Losing bone mass is a natural consequence of aging, especially in women post menopause. While osteoporosis is a concern, and the most commonly diagnosed bone disease, the loss of bone density due to aging can be devastating even without a diagnosis. Low bone density can result in your bones and hips breaking easily, severely limiting your mobility and curtailing your independence. Fortunately, there are a few changes you can make to your lifestyle and habits to keep your bones at the optimal health and strength for years to come.
While experiencing aches and pains here and there is a normal part of aging, and usually resolves quickly, within a day or two, sometimes pain may linger. Pain that occurs regularly for three or more months is known as chronic pain, which can disrupt your life and keep you from the things you enjoy. Knowing different strategies and methods for managing pain can help you reduce discomfort and preserve your independence.
You’ve probably heard the word “cholesterol” a lot when any discussion of heart health comes up. To keep a healthy heart, you must have low cholesterol. But then some cholesterol is apparently good, and it’s good to have a high level of it, so what’s the difference? What even is cholesterol? Where does it come from? It’s important to understand cholesterol and the role it plays in your body’s health, and how you can manage it to maintain your healthiest body.
Often lost among other causes, kidney diseases like diabetes and others are one of the leading causes of death in the United States. Because initial symptoms can be minor or get confused for other conditions, many kidney diseases go undiagnosed and untreated until kidney function is significantly decreased. This is why it’s important to keep the health of your kidneys in mind when aging, taking steps whenever possible to reduce the risk of kidney disease.
Halloween is traditionally thought of as a children’s holiday, for dressing up in a costume and going door to door trick or treating for candy, but just as many, if not more, adults have a deep appreciation and love for the holiday. For older adults, thinking they can’t participate in Halloween festivities anymore can cause them to miss out on a real opportunity for fun and family bonding.
While aging is an unavoidable fact of life, many of the negative effects we associate with aging are actually not. By taking good care of ourselves and living a healthy lifestyle, we can make sure to make the most out of each stage of our lives.
One of the many common complaints of aging is arthritis. The stiffness and soreness caused by swelling joints can make it more difficult to do tasks you once did easily, or even get around without discomfort.
One fact that many people know as an interesting bit of trivia is that the human body has 206 bones in the skeleton. But, there’s a follow up fact that is a bit lesser known. It’s that 52 of those bones, or more than a quarter, are contained in the feet! That makes it one of the most complicated and engineered structures in the body, and it makes sense because they’re literally the foundation on which the entire skeletal system, and the organs, muscles, and other tissues supported by it, rest.
Falling is the most preventable cause of injury to seniors, with one out of four seniors falling down each year. Less than half of those seniors who do fall will tell their doctors, and falling one time doubles your chances of falling again. One out of five falls will cause a serious injury such as a broken bone or head trauma. This means that one out of twenty seniors is seriously injured by a fall each year, making it one of the biggest dangers to older adults.
Before we can begin to manage stress, we must first understand what stress actually is. Simply defined, stress is the body’s response to a situation that requires action. Put even more simply, stress is how the body reacts to difficult, threatening, or challenging situations.
For seniors, life can be filled with uncertainty. As we grow into our twilight years, the changes that aging brings about can make us feel less in control, with less command over our lives and even our own bodies. By establishing a daily routine, personalized and specific to a senior’s particular wants, needs, and challenges, concentrating on what can be controlled can bring about a sense of empowerment.