New Zealand also initiated an Older Peoples Health Strategy with the following eight objectives:

• Older people, their families, and whanau (Maori expression for extended family) are able to make well-informed choices about options for healthy living, health care for elderly, and/or disability support needs. (more…)

When women are reaching the age of 40, they face a difficult dilemma. They have to choose between their skin face and healthy body. It may have been reported on some research that to lose weight in this age easily lead to an aging face. Sagging and not elastic face can be a problem. (more…)

Involuntary weight loss is the result of many chronic progressive diseases, often leading to diminished lean body mass, frailty, susceptibility to illness, and increased mortality. Various anabolic agents have been used to combat weight loss with mixed results. Similar to the frustration experienced by advocates of weight loss in the obese, none of the pharmacological appetite stimulants available at the current time have been uniformly successful in combating involuntary weight loss in the elderly population. (more…)

In some states, the Aging Network and the services it supports remain invisible or are low priority in the eyes of legislators and non-network agencies and organizations. A related challenge is that even though waiting lists for some Older Americans Act services are long, a majority of older adults appear to be unaware of existing services or are unwilling or unable to access them. (more…)

There are numerous basic Activities of Daily Living instruments that seek to quantify basic physical functions and obtain a numerical value. These systems are useful for prioritizing care needs, estimating resource demands, and tracking progress of individuals. Most basic Activities of Daily Living Elderly instruments can be traced back to the Katz Activities of Daily Living Index or the Barthel Index. (more…)

The majority of older adults who suffer from depression experience lower-level symptoms that do not meet diagnostic criteria for major depressive disorder. The DSM recognizes several well-defined disorders that are considered minor depressive states. Dysthymia is defined as presence of one of the two defining symptoms plus at least two other symptoms of depression continuously for a period of at least 2 years. This chronic, low-level depression typically manifests relatively early in life and is in fact less prevalent in older than in younger persons. (more…)

The systemic benefits of exogenous Growth Hormone therapy in the healthy elderly remain unclear and controversial. Studies have not been able to demonstrate a clear anabolic effect of replacement of Growth Hormone in elderly subjects, possibly because Growth Hormone replacement cannot completely correct the alterations in binding recommended proteins. (more…)

It is in this same period that college-and university-based Institutes for Learning in Retirement (ILRs, later renamed Lifelong Learning Institutes, or LLIs) arose. The prototype for subsequent LLIs was the Institute for Retired Professionals established in 1962 at the New School for Social Research (now New School University) in New York City. Only a handful of the member-led, member-taught, educational programs had appeared by the mid-1970s but by the mid-1980s there was a sharp rise in the rate of new programs started each year, until, by 2000, there were more than 400 of these programs across the United States and Canada. (more…)