Archive for July, 2010

Illness in the family? How to reduce caregiver stress
 
(ARA) – Who would ever imagine a healthy college senior might suffer a stroke? But that’s exactly what happened to Nancy Worthen’s daughter, Maggie, at the end of her senior year at Smith College in Massachusetts.

When Maggie fell into a coma after experiencing a brain stem stroke, one of the many stressful challenges Worthen faced was keeping family and friends from around the world updated on her daughter’s condition. "You just have so many people who want information and are trying to reach you," she says. "We wanted to make it simple for people to find out what was happening."

Worthen turned to a resource that’s becoming increasingly popular among families and caregivers of patients who’ve experienced a serious health event like Maggie’s stroke – free, personalized Web pages where they can post information about their loved one’s progress.

"Caregivers face many stresses when dealing with a loved one’s injury or illness, including the need to provide consistent updates to an extended network of family and friends who want to know how the patient is doing," says Sona Mehring, founder of CaringBridge.org, a nonprofit organization that helps caregivers create Web sites for health updates. "Putting information online can be a big stress reliever for caregivers because it allows them to communicate important, and sometimes difficult, information quickly and effectively to a large number of people, without having to repeat the same news over and over again."

Having a Web site "allowed us to tell the story we could never have told to people personally," says Michael Dunn, whose identical twin daughters were diagnosed with neuroblastoma when they were just two months old. "It would have been a much more difficult and lonely time without it."

"It’s important for caregivers to take care of themselves, as well," Mehring says. In addition to using the Internet to stay connected with family and friends, she suggests, caregivers should:

* Talk about it – Don’t avoid telling friends and family; it’s not good for your mental well-being to keep such stressful news to yourself.

* Ask questions – You’ll hear a lot of medical terminology and treatment options. Don’t be afraid to ask questions, seek second opinions and even gather information online from credible Web sites. The more you understand the situation, the more you will feel able to cope with it.

* Try therapeutic journaling – "Many people who use CaringBridge say it is beneficial to write their thoughts and feelings down," Mehring says. "Journaling can bring relief and allow people to focus their thoughts on other important matters. Sometimes it’s easier to write down what you’re feeling rather than speak it out loud."

* Accept help – People truly care and truly want to help; let them. Post on your personalized Web page what you need and let family and friends in your online community decide how and when they can help. One person might offer to help with transportation to appointments. Another may be able to help with babysitting or cooking meals. "View help as a useful expression of that person’s caring, not as a favor," Mehring suggests.

* Relax – This is a stressful situation. Patients and caregivers need to take time for themselves. Meditate, do yoga, go for a walk, take time off from work, turn off your phone for a few hours or get a massage.

Courtesy of ARAcontent
 

If you need care and assistance for a loved one in the Corona CA area, visit  www.ageadvantageriverside.com.

Your Risk of Heart Disease
How to Turn Back the Clock When Your Blood Vessels Grow Old Before You Do
By RON WINSLOW

"A man is as old as his arteries."

–Thomas Sydenham, English physician, 1624-1689

This comment, made nearly four centuries ago, raises a provocative modern-day question: Do you know how old your arteries are?

It is a question gaining increasing attention as researchers look for more effective ways to communicate risk of cardiovascular disease to patients and to motivate them to make changes in their lives that can help prevent heart attacks, strokes and other serious heart-related problems later in life.

Several tools are available that enable doctors and patients to calculate vascular age. These suggest there can be a substantial difference between how old you are and how old your blood vessels are. For instance, the vascular age of a 35-year-old man who smokes and has diabetes, high blood pressure and abnormal cholesterol could be as high as 76 years old—more than double his chronological age, according to a recent study. The arteries of a 30-year-old woman with similar risk factors could be equivalent to those of an average woman who is more than 80 years old.

Read more…

For information about how Age Advantage can help you care for a loved one in Riverside CA, visit  www.ageadvantageriverside.com.

When Siblings Step Up
By ANNE TERGESEN

Sisters and brothers are finding new ways to circumvent old conflicts as they take on one of the toughest roles in their lives: caregiver.

When Rene Talavera’s father, Jesus Talavera, 69, was hospitalized for kidney and heart failure last fall, the 45-year-old Chicago resident and his four siblings were catapulted into an uncomfortable new phase of life: caregiving.

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For information about caregiving for your loved one in the Corona CA area, visit  www.ageadvantageriverside.com.

Aftercare Tips for Patients Checking Out of the Hospital

According to a study published last year in The New England Journal of Medicine, one in five Medicare patients returns to the hospital within 30 days of being discharged. The problem is an expensive one: in 2004, these readmissions cost Medicare $17.4 billion dollars, the researchers also found.

IN mid-March my 85-year-old father checked into a prominent New York City hospital for a scheduled operation. The procedure, to remove a cancerous tumor from his thigh, went well, and soon he was sent home.

But three days later, unable to cope with a complicated wound care regimen, he landed back in the hospital.

My father had become part of a notorious trend. Discharge from the hospital is a critical point in a patient’s recovery, particularly for older people with chronic conditions. The process is supposed to be carefully planned, but instead it often is rushed and poorly coordinated, resulting in complications that send patients back to the emergency room.

According to a study published last year in The New England Journal of Medicine, one in five Medicare patients returns to the hospital within 30 days of being discharged. The problem is an expensive one: in 2004, these readmissions cost Medicare $17.4 billion dollars, the researchers also found.

Hospital stays certainly are shorter now: the average stay was 4.6 days in 2007, down from about 5.7 days in 1993. But the readmissions problem is not simply the result of compressed care, experts say.

Read more from the New York Times… 

For information about care and assistance for a loved one in the Riverside CA area, visit www.ageadvantageriverside.com.

Study: Loneliness Linked to High Blood Pressure in Older Individuals
By Donna Parker

Elderly individuals may want to take nutritional supplements such as potassium to lower their blood pressure, as feelings of loneliness may increase their levels.

According to researchers from the University of Chicago, feeling lonely increases the blood pressure rate of individuals who are 50 years old and up. The scientists examined the possibility that loneliness could bring on feelings of depression and stress, both of which are known to increase blood pressure levels.

The study examined 229 people between the ages of 50 and 68 and found that there was a connection between their blood pressure levels and need for companionship. While researchers were able to make a direct connection between the two, it still took a number of years for the correlation to go into effect.

“The increase associated with loneliness wasn’t observable until two years into the study, but then continued to increase until four years later,” researcher Louise Hawkley said.

Hawkley concluded that individuals’ fears of not having social connections could play into their increased blood pressure levels.

Source…

If your loved one needs care and assistance in the Riverside County area, visit us at www.ageadvantageriverside.com.