According to the Alzheimer’s Association 2013 Alzheimer’s Disease Facts & Figures report released today, one in three seniors dies with Alzheimer’s or another dementia in the United States. The new report shows that while deaths from other major diseases, such as heart disease, HIV/AIDS and stroke, continue to experience significant declines, Alzheimer’s deaths continue to rise – increasing 68% from 2000-2010.

In addition, the study evaluated the contribution of individual common diseases to death using a nationally representative sample of older adults and found that dementia was the second largest contributor to death behind heart failure. Among 70-years-olds with Alzheimer’s disease, 61% are expected to die within a decade. Among 70-year-olds without Alzheimer’s, only 30% will die within a decade.

Alzheimer’s and dementia place an enormous burden on individuals and families. In 2012, there were more than 15 million caregivers who provided more than 17 billion hours of unpaid care valued at $216 billion. Individuals with dementia often require increasing levels of supervision and personal care as the disease progresses. As symptoms exacerbate as the disease progresses, the care required of family members and friends can often result in increased emotional stress and health challenges for caregivers. To learn more about the information released in Facts and Figures, visit alz.org to watch a video summarizing the report.
2013 Facts & Figures Facts and Figures also includes a special section focusing on the challenges faced by long-distance caregivers for people living with Alzheimer’s. The report finds that nearly 15% of caregivers for people with Alzheimer’s or another dementia are “long-distance caregivers” – caring for people with Alzheimer’s disease who live at least 1 hour away. These long-distance caregivers had annual out-of-pocket expenses nearly twice as high as local caregivers.

The Alzheimer’s Association provides a suite of free resources, programs and materials to assist individuals who live alone and their families, including:

Helpline: Available 24/7, this free call center (800.272.3900) offers information and support from master’s level clinicians.

The Alzheimer’s and Dementia Caregiver Center: From providing information about behaviors of those affected, to helping you find local support, our toolbox is available to help you answer even the complex questions.

ALZConnected: ALZConnected, powered by the Alzheimer’s Association, is a dedicated social networking community for anyone affected by Alzheimer’s disease; it provides a safe place for people to connect with others in similar situations 24 hours a day, 365 days a year at no charge.

For more information and resources to support those living alone with Alzheimer’s, visit the Alzheimer’s Association website at alz.org.

ᔥAlzheimer’s Association

Teen-age college students are significantly more likely to abstain from drinking or to drink only minimally when their parents talk to them before they start college, using suggestions in a parent handbook developed by Robert Turrisi, professor of biobehavioral health, Penn State.

“Over 90 percent of teens try alcohol outside the home before they graduate from high school,” said Turrisi. “It is well known that fewer problems develop for every year that heavy drinking is delayed. Our research over the past decade shows that parents can play a powerful role in minimizing their teens’ drinking during college when they talk to their teens about alcohol before they enter college.”

The researchers recruited 1,900 study participants by randomly selecting incoming freshmen to a large, public northeastern university. Each of the individuals was identified as belonging to one of four groups: nondrinkers, weekend light drinkers, weekend heavy drinkers and heavy drinkers.

The team mailed Turrisi’s handbook to the parents of the student participants. The 22-page handbook contained information that included an overview of college student drinking, strategies and techniques for communicating effectively, ways to help teens develop assertiveness and resist peer pressure and in-depth information on how alcohol affects the body.

The parents were asked to read the handbook and then talk to their teens about the content of the handbook at one of three times to which they were randomly assigned: (1) during the summer before college, (2) during the summer before college and again during the fall semester of the first year of college and (3) during the fall semester of the first year of college.

“We were trying to determine the best timing and dosage for delivering the parent intervention,” Turrisi said. “For timing, we compared pre-college matriculation to after-college matriculation. For dosage, we compared one conversation about alcohol to two conversations about alcohol.”

The results appeared in a recent issue of the Journal of Studies on Alcohol and Drugs.

“We know that without an intervention there is movement from each drinking level into higher drinking levels,” Turrisi said. “For example, non-drinkers tend to become light drinkers, light drinkers will become medium drinkers and medium drinkers will become heavy drinkers. Our results show that if parents follow the recommendations suggested in the handbook and talk to their teens before they enter college, their teens are more likely to remain in the non-drinking or light-drinking groups or to transition out of a heavy-drinking group if they were already heavy drinkers.”

According to Turrisi, talking to teens in the fall of the first year of college may not work as well; for many families it had no effect on students’ drinking behaviors. Likewise, adding extra parent materials in the fall seemed to have no additional benefit.

ᔥPenn State University

A new study suggests that people get frustrated when they are offered the opportunity to cheat or steal and that chance is then taken away from them.

Other studies have shown that blocking people from achieving their positive goals increases frustration, which is not surprising. But this is the first to show that even denying people the chance to commit forbidden behaviors can increase frustration.

That’s not all. The researchers also found that people who are frustrated in their attempts to cheat or steal are more likely than others to be attracted to violent video games.

“We made new discoveries in what makes people frustrated and aggressive, but also what people do when they’re feeling this frustration,” said Brad Bushman, co-author of the study and professor of communication and psychology at Ohio State University.

“Our results help us understand why people are attracted to violent entertainment in the first place – they feel they can take out their frustration virtually.”

Bushman conducted the study with Jodi Whitaker, a graduate student at Ohio State, and Andre Melzer and Georges Steffgen of the University of Luxembourg.

Their results appear online in the journal Psychological Science.

The researchers conducted two experiments. The first involved 120 male college students, who were given 30 minutes to complete a multiple-choice history exam. They were told that those who did well on the exam would earn chocolates or apples (their choice).

All of the participants were given the exam in an envelope. But half of them received a completed exam with a score of 100 percent marked at the top – the test had no name on it, so they could claim it as their own.

After five minutes, the experimenter interrupted participants and said: “Sorry, I gave you the wrong copy of the exam.” The participants handed back their exams in the envelope, and were given another envelope with the exam. This exam was also either scored 100 percent or left blank.

Of those who initially were given the chance to cheat on the exam, half still had the chance to cheat, while that chance was withdrawn for the other half.

After turning in their tests, the students waited to receive their grades.

The question was: How would those people who lost their chance to cheat react? To find out, the students were told they could complete a brief study about video games while they waited for their test results.

Participants read descriptions of eight fictitious video games, four violent and four nonviolent, and rated how much they wanted to play each game on a scale of 1 (not at all) to 10 (extremely).

Those students who had the chance to cheat withdrawn were more attracted to the violent video games than those in the other two groups (never had a chance to cheat, or had a chance to cheat the entire time). The latter two groups did not differ in their attraction to violent video games.

None of the three groups differed in their attraction to nonviolent games.

Bushman noted that none of the students admitted to cheating, or having the chance to cheat, even though they did cheat (as evidenced by their scores). But the students who were denied the chance to cheat obviously had a different view than others on their video game choices.

“Because violent video games permit aggression, they may be especially attractive to people who experience frustration,” Bushman said. “We believe students felt frustrated when they didn’t get a chance to cheat on the test.”

The researchers looked more closely at the link between frustration and attraction to violent video games in a second experiment that included 141 male college students. This experiment involved stealing rather than cheating. Students used a bowl of quarters to demonstrate their estimate of how many coins would weigh the same as an object.

In a similar setup to the first study, some students had the opportunity to steal coins, while others had that opportunity taken away from them. The remainder never had the opportunity to steal.

Afterwards, the students completed a “mood” form, in which they were asked to rate on a scale of one to five how much they felt various feelings, including frustration. They then rated how much they wanted to play the same eight fictitious video games used in the first study.

First of all, students who did have the chance to steal tended to do so – an average of between about one and three quarters, depending on their level of access, Bushman said.

Those who had the chance to steal withdrawn from them showed higher-than-average levels of frustration than those in the other two groups – and they were more likely to be attracted to the violent video games.

“The prevention of taboo behaviors like stealing produces frustration, just as does the prevention of more desirable goals,” Bushman said. “This is a new finding that adds to our understanding of what causes frustration and aggression.”

The results also help explain the appeal of violent video games.

“Many people believe that violent video games are a kind of catharsis, allowing them to alleviate angry feelings,” he said. “Research findings suggest this isn’t true, but that’s part of the appeal to many people.”

ᔥ Ohio State University