Published: December 9, 2010
- Americans are living longer.
- The influx of Americans entering their senior years, coupled with a declining percentage of workers in the prime earning years, will put increasing pressure upon the benefits and sustainability of the Social Security and Medicare programs as well as other social safety nets programs directed at the elderly.
- Economic trends show that Americans have not been accumulating adequate savings for retirement.
Nearly half of all Americans between the ages of 60 and 90 will encounter at least one year of poverty or near poverty, says a recent study by Mark R. Rank, PhD, the Herbert S. Hadley Professor of Social Work at the Brown School at Washington University in St. Louis.
“Of course, this risk is not evenly distributed across the population,” Rank says. “One of the most drastic economic divides is race.”
Rank found that although 32.7 percent of white older Americans will experience at least one year below the official poverty line, the corresponding percentage for black older Americans was double that at 64.6 percent. [continue reading…]
Published: November 9, 2010
The LA Times Reports on a new study published online — and soon available in the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society — which found that older drivers who completed 10 sessions of brain training had about half as many motor-vehicle collisions in which they were at fault than those who had no training. Curious? Continue reading
Source: LA Times
Published: November 3, 2010
A University of Toronto study shows that visual attention — the brain’s ability to selectively filter unattended or unwanted information from reaching awareness — diminishes with age, leaving older adults less capable of filtering out distracting or irrelevant information. [continue reading…]
Published: November 3, 2010
Volunteering is known to provide health benefits to the person doing the volunteering. Now, a new study finds that older adults with functional limitations (trouble conducting daily tasks like cooking meals) in particular appear to reap the benefits from helping others.
The new study addresses the question of whether the impact of volunteering on risk of mortality was stronger for older adults with or without functional limitations. [continue reading…]
