Dementia

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Perhaps if our frail and elderly were to claim asylum they would be treated better?

At least they would have the Prime Ministers wife to fight their corner.

- John Phillips, Derby.England When New Labour says Make Poverty History they are hypocrites as Charity, like Respect, Start at Home.The generation who fought the war for us are in shock and awe of their lot.

- Bill, UK The people who have paid into the welfare system all their lives are now finding what a con it really is, when scroungers seem to get top priority.

I think you should have to pay into the system before you can take anything out.

- Ryk, London View all Add your comment Name: Your email address will not be publishedEmail: Town and country: Terms and conditionsYour comment: make text area biggerYou have characters left.

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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 that substrate would affec...

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.

Speaking on BBC Radio 4's Today programme, he said: "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.

"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 which was "pretty good".

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 "lousy" he said and low pay meant staff rarely stayed long enough to build up vital relationships leaving elderly residents "doubly insecure".

"In elderly people's homes, the training is lousy - it's better than it was but it's still kind of tick-box training that makes sure that they have enough calories and don't get burned to death.

"But as far as thinking of the elderly in terms of human happiness, there is very little of that going on." "It ...