Dementia

...ba href=/dementia/a/b, are associated with falls.

Cognitive tests could help doctors assess risk for falls; conversely, slow gait could alert them to check for cognitive impairment.

The findings are in the March issue of Neuropsychology, which is published by the American Psychological Association (APA).

Roee Holtzer, PhD, and his colleagues conducted a cross-sectional study of 186 cognitively normal, community-dwelling adults aged 70 and older at New York City's Albert Einstein College of Medicine.

Gait speed was tested with and without interference.

In the interference conditions, participants had to walk while reciting alternate letters of the alphabet.

Performance on cognitive tests of executive control and memory, and to a lesser extent of verbal ability, predicted "gait velocity" (walking speed) tested without interference.

For gait velocity tested with interference, only executive control and memory were predictive.

Adding interference to the tests of gait allowed the researchers to better simulate the real world, in which walkers continually deal with distractions.

The authors conclude that executive control and memory function are important when the individual has to walk in a busy environment.

The findings suggest that in old age, walking involves higher-order executive-control processes.

That is, the intersecting cognitive and motor processes involved in walking may both rely on a common brain substrate, or set of structures.

As a result, changes in th...

...ba href=/dementia/a/b and terminal illnesses" and "don't have the energy, the interest or the mental capacity to work through the system," Root said (Pear, New York Times, 3/26).

Language Barriers to Enrollment The Los Angeles Times on Monday examined how elderly immigrants in California and other areas with large immigrant populations are "swamping clinics, community centers and pharmacies, unable to read the litany of Medicare-related mailings or even ask questions about their new plans." According to the Los Angeles Times, with the May 15 deadline for enrollment nearing, many elderly immigrants are finding that private health insurers and Medicare officials do not have the capacity to accommodate translation requests, and some who have lived and worked in the U.S.

"for years resent feeling excluded from a national program." Jeanne Finberg, an attorney for the National Senior Citizens Law Center, said, "The federal government has really failed this population," adding, "How outrageous is it that so many of the Medicare beneficiaries are unable to understand any part of this program?

" Medicare officials last week said they are performing outreach at senior centers that serve non-English speakers and are funding toll-free call lines that cater to native Spanish, Chinese, Vietnamese and Korean speakers.

"We have room for improvement," Anne Avery, a health insurance specialist for Medicare, said, adding, "We are just starting a lot more to find out what vehicles we can use to reach ou...

...ba href=/dementia/a/b sufferers Tony Robinson, the actor and presenter, today criticised society’s "brutality" towards the elderly, comparing it with the scandal of 19th century child labour.

The Time Team presenter and long-term Labour activist will feature in a television documentary tonight about the fate of his mother Phyllis, 89, a ba href=/dementia/a/b sufferer.

She died on the last day of filming for the programme - something Mr Robinson said was in many ways "a blessed relief" from her suffering.

But he lashed out at the "crazily wrong" priorities in the UK.

"In 100 years’ time, people will look back on the way we look after the infirm elderly today with the same sense of disbelief that we look back on child labour," Mr Robinson told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme.

"There is a kind of a brutality and a stupidity and an ignorance about all of us in relation to the elderly which is quite extraordinary." He said he was not levelling particular criticism at the nursing home that looked after his mother.

But he said "I didn’t think really she was being treated as a citizen at all; I thought she was being treated as a problem which needed to be coped with, a managerial problem.

"The home that she went into was pretty good.

I wasn’t pointing the finger at a particular home much more at what out attitudes are like." Training for care workers was inadequate, he said, and low pay meant staff rarely stayed long enough to build up vital relationships leaving elderly residents "doub...