Youth caregivers reported spending a median of 2.5 hours each school day and four hours each weekend day performing caregiving tasks at home. Estimates of median caregiving task time reported by family members were slightly lower at 1.5 hours on weekdays and 2.25 hours on weekend days.
These tasks include assisting family members with getting around, eating, dressing, toileting, bathing and continence care. Youth caregivers also kept the family member company, provided emotional support, cleaned the house, shopped for groceries, administered medications, translated in clinical settings and handled medical equipment at home.
In a multivariate Cox model, both perceived swallowing difficulties and overnight denture wearing were independently associated with approximately 2.3-fold higher risk of the incidence of pneumonia, which was comparable with the high risk attributable to cognitive impairment, history of stroke and respiratory disease. In addition, those who wore dentures while sleeping were more likely to have tongue and denture plaque, gum inflammation, positive culture for Candida albicans, and higher levels of circulating interleukin-6 as compared to their counterparts.
More than half of federal and state prisoners are parents of nearly 1.5 million minor children, and one-fifth of prisoners have children under the age of five. Children of incarcerated parents are more likely to have witnessed criminal activity and/or the arrest of the parent, both of which have been shown by researchers to have unique effects undermining children's socio-emotional and behavioral adjustment.
"The long-term impact of parental incarceration has been best documented among boys," said Tuppett Yates, an associate professor of psychology at UC Riverside. "Compared both to boys who had not experienced parental absence and to boys whose fathers were absent due to hospitalization, divorce, death, or other reasons, boys who experienced parental incarceration before age 10 reported more co-occurring internalizing and anti-social problems at ages 18, 32, and 48, more delinquent behavior at age 32, and were more likely to have been convicted of a crime by age 25. Likewise, among both boys and girls, parental incarceration has been associated with concurrent social and academic problems, and prospective substance abuse."
Amazing resource.......
http://www.dartmouthatlas.org/
For more than 20 years, the Dartmouth Atlas Project has documented glaring variations in how medical resources are distributed and used in the United States. The project uses Medicare data to provide information and analysis about national, regional, and local markets, as well as hospitals and their affiliated physicians. This research has helped policymakers, the media, health care analysts and others improve their understanding of our health care system and forms the foundation for many of the ongoing efforts to improve health and health systems across America.
Interesting.....
Surveying patients with traumatic brain injuries, a group of Los Angeles Biomedical Research Institute (LA BioMed) researchers reported that they found those who tested positive for THC, the active ingredient in marijuana, were more likely to survive than those who tested negative for the illicit substance.
The findings, published in the October edition of The American Surgeon, suggest THC, or tetrahydrocannabinol, may help protect the brain in cases of traumatic brain injury, the researchers said. The study included 446 patients who suffered traumatic brain injuries and underwent a urine test for the presence of THC in their system. The researchers found 82 of the patients had THC in their system. Of those, only 2.4% died. Of the remaining patients who didn't have THC in their system, 11.5% died.
The findings, published in the current online edition of the journal Aging, "are very encouraging. However, at the current time the results are anecdotal, and therefore a more extensive, controlled clinical trial is warranted," said Dale Bredesen, the Augustus Rose Professor of Neurology and Director of the Easton Center at UCLA, a professor at the Buck Institute, and the author of the paper.
In the case of Alzheimer's disease, Bredesen notes, there is not one drug that has been developed that stops or even slows the disease's progression, and drugs have only had modest effects on symptoms. "In the past decade alone, hundreds of clinical trials have been conducted for Alzheimer's at an aggregate cost of over a billion dollars, without success," he said.
To help you manage the chaos, we’ve put together tips to help restore some order when your caree is being discharged from the hospital to home:
1. Start the discharge process as soon as possible.
You’ll want to start preparing for discharge almost immediately after your caree’s admission. You may only learn of a discharge date the day before or even the day off the actual discharge. Know that whether or not your caree’s insurance, including Medicare, will continue to pay will trigger the discharge. And, sometimes, that trigger will happen the night before the day the discharge planner calls to say, “We’re discharging your mom this morning.”
Keep in mind that the goal of the discharge planning process is to identify and prepare for your caree’s anticipated health care needs once he returns home.