How to Age Gracefully – Attitude is Everything 0
Young people’s stereotypes about their elders may contribute to health problems years later. Younger adults who think of old people as helpless, feeble or forgetful are more likely to experience strokes, heart attacks and other health problems when they grow…- Professional Medical
- Tags: Aging Aging & Wellness News Studies
Call Your (Grand)Parents! 0
Older adults who lack family and friends, or who feel lonely despite having others around them, tend to be in poorer physical and mental health, a new study finds.
Researchers found that among roughly 3,000 U.S. adults ages 57 to 85, those with few social connections were less likely to describe their physical health as good or excellent. Meanwhile, those who felt socially isolated — even if they had friends, family and social activities — tended to report poorer physical and mental well-being.
The findings, reported in the Journal of Health and Social Behavior, add to evidence linking social connections to older adults’ health.
But they also suggest that older people’s actual social support and their perceptions of that support each have independent effects, according to the researchers.
“Most older adults will experience significant changes in their social relationships due to things like retirement and bereavement, for example,” said lead researcher Dr. Erin York Cornwell, of Cornell University in Ithaca, New York.
More after the jump.
Source: Journal of Health and Social Behavior, March 2009
- Professional Medical
- Tags: Caregiving News Studies
Maggots No Wonder Cure 0
Hmm.. I think I’ll pass on the flesh-eating maggots.
LONDON (Reuters) – Putting flesh-eating maggots into open wounds may not be such a great idea after all.
They do clean wounds more quickly than normal treatment but this does not lead to faster healing, results of the world’s first controlled clinical trial of maggot medicine showed on Friday.
Some patients also found so-called larval therapy more painful, according to the study in the British Medical Journal.
Gruesome as it sounds, maggots have a long history in medicine. Napoleon’s battle surgeon was a maggot enthusiast, and they were put to work during the American Civil War and in the trenches in World War One.
More recently, medical experts have been looking again at the creatures’ healing powers, including their potential to prevent dangerous infections like methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA).
To find out more, researchers at Britain’s University of York recruited 267 patients with venous leg ulcers and treated them either with maggots or hydrogel, a standard wound-cleaning product.
They found no significant difference in outcomes or cost.
More after the jump.
Source: Reuters
Collagen Injections to Relieve Incontinence in Women 0
Collagen injections can benefit women who still suffer from stress urinary incontinence even after urethral or periurethral surgery, a UT Southwestern Medical Center researcher has found. “Patients with persistent or recurrent incontinence often do not wish to undergo another surgery,”…- Professional Medical
- Tags: Incontinence Studies
