Keeping You Safe From COVID-19
Interested in a career at Golden Heart Senior Care. APPLY HERE!

Month: March 2021

Common Causes of Kidney Disease in Older Adults

Posted on by Craig Bass

Over time, some people find their kidneys slowly stop working correctly. Chronic kidney disease affects 37 million adults in the U.S. Early detection is important as it can keep the disease from progressing into kidney failure.

What are the common causes of kidney disease? March is National Kidney Month. It’s a good time to take a closer look at chronic kidney disease to get a better understanding of why it happens.

There Are Two Main Causes

Two things stand out as the reason kidney disease occurs. The first is high blood pressure. The second is diabetes.

Start with high blood pressure. When it’s present, it puts more pressure on the blood vessels, which causes damage. Over time, they narrow, which reduces the amount of blood that flows through the kidneys. That makes it harder for them to correctly remove waste and fluids from the blood, which in turn can increase blood pressure.

It’s estimated that about 33 percent of diabetics also have kidney disease. Diabetes occurs when blood sugar levels are higher than they should be. Kidneys are responsible for removing waste and excess fluid from the bloodstream. The high blood sugar levels can damage blood vessels in the kidneys, which keeps the kidneys from working effectively.

Prevention is Key

If you have high blood pressure or diabetes, management of those underlying diseases is critical in keeping the kidneys healthy. People with high blood pressure need to use diet, exercise, and even medications to keep the blood pressure at ideal levels.

For diabetics, management of blood sugar levels through diet, exercise, and regular testing is important. If glucose or insulin are needed to balance high and low readings, make sure your parents understand how. They may need to work closely with medical professionals to do this.

They need to see their doctor as often as is recommended. It may be yearly exams or several exams a year. Monitoring blood pressure may be something your parents have to start doing each week at home. Checking blood sugar levels is going to happen several times a day.

If your mom and dad have high blood pressure, diabetes, or chronic kidney disease, diet and exercise are important. You may need to encourage them to follow doctor’s orders. What if you don’t live close enough to stop by each day?

Talk to a home care agency about daily visits from professional caregivers. Caregivers can cook meals for your parents, encourage them to go for walks, and drive them to their different medical appointments. Caregivers become an integral part of the team helping keep your parents healthy.

Sources:
https://www.niddk.nih.gov/health-information/diabetes/overview/preventing-problems/diabetic-kidney-disease
https://www.kidney.org/atoz/content/about-chronic-kidney-disease

If you or an aging loved one is considering caregivers in Groveland, FL, please contact the caring staff at Golden Heart Senior Care of Clermont today. 1-888-423-4046.

Are Seniors Helpless Against Dementia?

Posted on by Craig Bass

While dementia and Alzheimer’s disease remain a scientific quandary, they are not as inevitable as we thought in the past.

The organic marker for dementia is a sticky plaque called amyloid beta. Amyloid beta shows up on the brain scans of people who are positive for dementia. But here’s the fascinating thing: Some very old people with obvious amyloid beta on their scans are sharp as a tack.

Dutch scientists recently completed a study of centenarians–people who live to be over one hundred, many of whom were quite astute and cognitively alert and capable. What they found is that the risk of developing dementia doesn’t get any worse after one hundred.

Age is the main risk factor for dementia, but people at a hundred are at no worse risk than folks at seventy-five.

Resilience Might Be the Key

The same ability to adapt and bounce back from adversity that gets people through a COVID-19 epidemic might be the same thing that saves some seniors from dementia. This ability to survive and thrive despite obstacles is called resilience.

And here’s the further good news. Most seniors are capable of resilience, even in the face of chronic health conditions, loss of body strength and flexibility, and reduction in income.

So how do seniors cultivate resilience? And how can you, as the adult child of a senior, encourage resilience?

Turns out, a lot of it comes down to attitude. Positive attitudes and hopefulness are strongly aligned with resilience. Other factors that play a role are:

  • Being able to do the acts of daily living on one’s own. That means people who can still cook, feed, and clean themselves, perhaps with difficulty but without help, are going to be more resilient.
  • Exercise. The relationship between exercise and staving off dementia is imperfectly understood, but we know there is a link between them.
  • Having a support group. The ideal support group for someone over sixty-five is a mix of loving family members, elder care professionals, compassionate neighbors, and peers. A support group is most effective if the senior feels that he brings value to all his relationships.

Elder Care Can Foster Resilience

Home care professionals who come to your parent’s home and provide a range of services can help a senior retain resilience or cultivate it. As needed, these home care aides provide stimulating conversation, help seniors learn new things, and find ways for seniors to adapt to health conditions and mobility losses.

In conclusion, new research suggests that dementia may be preventable up to a point in many older people. Even people in their nineties and over a hundred can maintain sharp brains. And resilience plays a large part in that. Encourage your senior to think positively, keep learning new things, and stay social.

Sources

https://abcnews.go.com/Health/dementia-alzheimers-inevitable-part-aging-study/story?id=75368488
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle/2775218

If you or an aging loved one is considering elder care in Ferndale, FL, please contact the caring staff at Golden Heart Senior Care of Clermont today. 1-888-423-4046.