Walkathon in Mumbai : HelpAge India programme

Helpage India request you to attend the walkathon on 1^st Oct.’09 between 3.15 pm to 4 pm from Plaza Theatre to Aaji aajoba Udyan,Dadar(W)

The cause of the elderly needs attention because we are a society in transition with changing values, which has led to the breakdown of the joint family, resulting in lack of security for the elderly. Moreover, with rising longevity, the number of elderly in society is also increasing at a phenomenal rate. From 92 million today the gray population is expected to rise to 177 million by 2025. At present of the 60+ population, 90% have no social security, 40% are below the poverty line and 70% are illiterate.With increasing life expectancy many older persons are now spending longer years out of paid work,dependent on family,on public health care and battling illness and a steep rise in the cost of living. You will appreciate that we have a monumental task ahead.

As we know that United Nations decleared 1^st October as “International Day Of Older Persons”.On this special day HelpAge India, a national level secular, apolitical, non-profit and non-government organization working for the cause and care of disadvantaged older persons from last three decades,organisining a campaign titled “Age Demands Action”.

Towards this we are conducting a Walkathon on 1^st October’09.The proposed walkathon will start from Plaza Theatre,Dadar(W) at 3.15 pm & culminate at Aaji Aajoba Udyan,Near Shivaji Park,Dadar(W) at 4.15 pm.The walkathon will be flagged off by Shri.Kiran Shantaram at Plaza Theatre.The participants will consist of around 50-60 Sr.Citizens & some students.They will be carrying the placards which will focus on issues related to the Sr.Citizens such as Social Security,Health Care,Shelter, National Policy On Older Persons,etc.

We look forward to your support and cooperation in the matter.

Thank you,

Yours truly,

Prakash Borgaonkar

Joint Director RM (W)

HelpAge India

34A/44, Guruchhaya,

Manish Nagar, Andheri (W)

Mumbai 400 053.

Prakash.Borgaonkar@helpageindia.org

‘Women and Retirement Planning’ seminar in Mumbai

Women for Good Governance cordially invites you to attend a very informative seminar on ‘Women and Retirement Planning’ On Friday 2nd October 2009 from 10 am to 5.40 pm at All India Local Self Government, Juhu Lane, Andheri (W), Mumbai.


This seminar is organized with the objective of raising awareness on the topic and to find ways to deal with it. Today women are enjoying better life span but the stress and disease is taking its toll on the quality of the lives esp. for women. Very few fortunate women enjoy their life on retiring from work or when responsibilities towards children are fulfilled. Seminar will emphasize on Hobby/Skill development/ Finance Matters / Property / Insurance / WILL / Health problems related to age and its management.

While Mrs. Seema Redkar, BMC officer on special duty will be Chief Guest. Main speakers are Dr. Rajiv Anand, Mrs Gulistan Carpenter, Dr. Rekha Bhatkhande, Dr. Mahendra Mehta & Mr. S S Pai.

Special Registration charges fro Senior Citizens Rs. 150/- (includes lunch, teas and relevant material )

For affirmation & registration, please call:

Dr. Shashi Sharma: 9819140555
shashisohan@hotmail.com ; ramita@gmail.com

A Look Inside the Alzheimer's Brain

A Look Inside the Alzheimer's Brain

Shared via AddThis

Helping Elderly Leave Nursing Homes for a Home

Walter Brown never wanted to live in a nursing home, but when he had a stroke two years ago, he saw little choice. Mr. Brown, 72, could not walk, use his left arm or transfer himself into his wheelchair.


“It was like being in jail,” Mr. Brown said on a recent afternoon. “In the nursing home you’ve got to do what they say when they say it, go to bed when they tell you, eat what they want you to eat. The food was terrible.”


But recently state workers helped Mr. Brown find a two-bedroom apartment in public housing here, which he shares with his daughter. “It just makes me more relaxed, more confident in myself,” he said, speaking with some difficulty, but with a broad smile. “More confident in the future.”


A growing number of states are reaching out to people like Mr. Brown, who have been in nursing homes for more than six months, aiming to disprove the notion that once people have settled into a nursing home, they will be there forever. Since 2007, Medicaid has teamed up with 29 states to finance such programs, enabling the low-income elderly and people with disabilities to receive many services in their own homes.


The program in Pennsylvania provides up to $4,000 in moving expenses, including a furniture allowance and modifications to the apartment, and Mr. Brown has a home health aide every morning and a care manager to arrange for services like physical therapy. The new programs, financed largely by $1.75 billion from Medicaid, are a sharp departure from past practices, where Medicaid practically steered people into nursing homes.


“Medicaid has had an institutional bias in favor of nursing homes,” even for people who do not need them, said Gene Coffey, a staff lawyer at the nonprofit National Senior Citizens Law Center. “Federal law requires states to provide nursing home services. They don’t have to provide home or community-based services.”


For Mr. Brown, the transition to his own home has changed his life, he said. Now, with his motorized wheelchair, he travels the city on public buses, visiting friends in other neighborhoods.


“It’s a great feeling,” he said. “In the nursing home I got up at 5 o’clock in the morning, then the rest of the day was just watching the TV or my VCR. I wanted to be able to get out and see people, see the world. I didn’t want to be confined. Now I go where I want to go.”

States and the federal government hope to save money, though research about cost savings has so far been inconclusive. A recent study by researchers at the University of California, San Francisco, found that home care costs taxpayers $44,000 a year less than a nursing home stay — though this number cannot be used to estimate total savings, because often home-based services replace family care, not nursing home care.


About 1.5 million Americans are living in nursing homes.


“It’s amazing how quickly people can end up in a nursing home,” said Jean Janik, the director of community living options at the nonprofit Philadelphia Corporation for Aging. “Say you’re a single man and have a stroke, and need to go into a nursing home to rehab. You’re elderly so you don’t quite bounce back quickly. After 60 days, Medicare doesn’t pay any longer, so you need a Medicaid grant to stay in the nursing home. Then your Social Security will go to the nursing home.”


Many lose their apartments and regular support from family members, Ms. Janik said.


“We meet people who say, ‘I went to the hospital and next thing I know, here I am. I don’t know what happened to my apartment.’ ” Ms. Janik added, “We go and check, and it’s not in their name. Especially if they don’t have a strong family support system in place. A lot of people just think, Uncle Joe fell and broke his hip and now he’s in a nursing home, so be it, that’s where he’ll be. People don’t realize they can get services in their home.”


Each participating state has designed its own program, called Money Follows the Person. The federal government, which shares Medicaid costs, provides extra financing for the first year.


Some experts worry that the programs will end up transferring some of the expenses of caring for the elderly or the disabled to their family members.
Carol Irvin, a senior researcher at Mathematica Policy Research has been contracted by Medicare and Medicaid Services to study the costs of the program in its first five years.


“It could be shifting costs onto a person’s relatives,” Ms. Irvin said. “But even if it’s not saving money, a lot of people believe living in the community is the right thing for individuals.”


Elizabeth Kamara, 72, spent 18 months in a nursing home after having her left foot amputated because of diabetes. Mrs. Kamara can get around using a walker, but in the nursing home she spent whole days in a wheelchair.


“I just let people do things for me,” she said. “They say, ‘If you fall, we’ll get in trouble. Please sit down.’ ”

Mrs. Kamara has moved into a independent living facility, where she cooks dishes from her native Sierra Leone and navigates the hallways on her own. She gives herself insulin injections and gets a friend to drive her to doctors’ appointments. An aide comes twice a week to help clean. “This is my home; I’m free,” she said. “In the nursing home it was two persons in one room. Here I have my privacy. I can get my hair done, my nails done.”


Susan C. Reinhard, a senior vice president of the AARP Public Policy Institute, said of Money Follows the Person: “It’s gotten Congress’s attention, and shown that people can leave a nursing home. That is a wake-up.”


For Esther Pinckney, 88, who ended up in a nursing home after a stroke, moving out has been literally a breath of fresh air. Ms. Pinckney now lives in a bright subsidized apartment where home aides visit twice a day.


“What didn’t I like about the nursing home?” she asked recently. “What would you like about smell, smell, smell, morning, noon and night?”


Because Ms. Pinckney lost her apartment and furniture while she was in the nursing home, the Philadelphia Corporation for Aging bought her new furniture and a microwave oven. Before, she said, her Social Security check went to the nursing home; now she pays 30 percent of her check for her rent. “I couldn’t even buy a soda,” Ms. Pinckney said. “You want to be independent, don’t you? That’s what I wanted.”


Life on her own has not been perfect, she admitted. Aides often fail to show up or spend their time talking on the telephone.


But her pastor takes her to church four times a week, and she can go to stores near her building. If her health should fail again, she said, she did not like to think about going back into a nursing home.


“Don’t mention it,” she said, her face tightening. “I don’t want to do that.”


Source: http://www.globalaging.org/health/us/2009/nursing-homes.htm

Older, Wiser, Slower: After 50

Avid Athletes Find That to Stay Healthy, They Must Let Go of the Need to Win

During Sunday's Chicago Triathlon, I kept my heart rate low, cut my pace at every hint of muscular or cardiovascular pain and crossed the finish line about half an hour behind my personal record in that race. It was exhilarating.

What I accomplished is a goal I once considered unreachable, not to mention undesirable: I raced without competing. My ranking among the more than 4,200 participants in the Olympic-distance triathlon couldn't have mattered less to me. More important, I ditched the notion of competing against oneself. That had been an appealing concept at age 40, when I was fitter, faster and trimmer than I'd been at age 20. But at 50, the triumphs of the last decade—the time I flew past most of the few-and-proud at the Marine Corps Triathlon—are far behind me, and anyway my cardiologist is urging moderation since the discovery of an aneurysm in my aortic root. "Race all you want," he says, "but keep your heart rate below 120," far lower than most peak workout targets.

Amid ever-rising calls for more exercise in America, there isn't much guidance on cutting back. As the baby boomers who fueled marathon and triathlon crazes enter their 50s and 60s, their unquenched competitiveness can become a threat to their stiffening joints, rigid muscles, hardening arteries and high-mileage hearts. And it doesn't help that nearly every exercise message they hear emphasizes more. It's as if nobody wants to acknowledge that exercise isn't the fountain of youth.

"The no-pain-no-gain mentality suggests that you can keep making gains if you just work harder," says Mark Allen, a 51-year-old athletic coach once known as the world's fittest man for winning six Ironman Triathlon World Championships. As co-author of a new book called "Fit Soul, Fit Body," Mr. Allen argues against fighting age with more hours on the treadmill. "If you can't let up on the competitive part of it, if you have to go as fast at 50 as you did at 20, you will grind yourself into the ground and become stressed out, bitter and unhealthy," he says.

A growing number of exercise scientists are questioning the more-and-harder philosophy of fitness, and not only for aging athletes. A study published last year in the Annals of Behavioral Medicine reinforced other recent research showing that intensity tends to diminish the view of physical activity as pleasant. "Evidence shows that feeling worse during exercise translates to doing less exercise in the future," says Panteleimon Ekkekakis, an author of that study and a professor of kinesiology at Iowa State University.

Taking on new sports or challenges can give long-used muscles a break while feeding the desire for new goals, says Marjorie Albohm, president of the National Athletic Trainers' Association, who at 58 has become a recent devotee of spinning. "As you age, you have to be flexible about new activities.

Of course, exercise can provide substantial protection against chronic ailments ranging from heart disease and diabetes to dementia and depression, all the while helping weight control. But like any medical treatment, exercise can also cause damage, particularly in older athletes. The risk of sudden cardiac death rises substantially during exercise. Overuse injuries, especially involving joints, rise with age.

Older athletes struggling against declining performance are prone to excess training, which can hurt the immune system and raise levels of the stress hormone, cortisol. A number of medical experts, including Kenneth Cooper, the physician long ago credited with founding the aerobics movement, now believe that extreme exercise can increase the body's vulnerability to disease like cancer.

For aging athletes, it is loss of prowess that can lead either to abandoning exercise or to a health-endangering doubling up of it, "in pursuit of what can't be recaptured," as Mr. Allen puts it.

In his mid-40s, after dozens of triathlons and swimming competitions, Dan Projansky was yearning for something new, so he took up the unusual challenge of open-water distance swimming, using only the butterfly. That's a stroke that wears out many accomplished swimmers after a few hundred yards. But this month, Mr. Projansky gained glory in national swimming circles for completing an open-water 10-kilometer swim using only the butterfly. "I belong in the psych ward," jokes Mr. Projansky, a suburban Chicago insurance professional who is 51.

The competitive flame is hard to extinguish, as the returns from retirement of cyclist Lance Armstrong and professional quarterback Brett Favre have shown. And it's no different for fanatical amateurs. A decade ago, marriage and children brought to an end the elite triathlon career of Matt Rhodes, a 50-year-old Chicago metals trader. But in the pool where he swims these days, he competes against whoever is in the lane beside him, particularly if that athlete appears younger, "and I'm crushed if he's faster than me, even though he doesn't know I exist," says Mr. Rhodes. He still believes, "probably wrongly," that he could match his long-ago feats in triathlon.

Charles North similarly understands the undying nature of competitive urges. He was relieved when knee troubles ended his record of elite-level distance running, including a 2:46:34 Boston Marathon. As a practicing physician with two young children, "I really didn't have time to train like that anymore," he says.

But no sooner did Dr. North start swimming than he began plotting how to finish atop his age group at statewide meets. "Then it occurred to me, 'What does it matter?' " recalls Dr. North, 61. Even so, while cycling in the hills around Albuquerque these days, he often feels compelled to pass the riders he comes upon, he says, especially if they're younger.

In my case, the aneurysm-induced prohibition against high-intensity aerobics seven years ago presented an ultimatum: Either give up trying my hardest in races, or quit racing altogether. At the time, I was still setting personal records, and training alongside competitors who had the Ironman logo tattooed on their ankles.

Unable to imagine myself aiming for last place, I gave up triathlon. For exercise, I devoted usually an hour a day to walking, riding a stationary bike or jogging around a neighborhood track, and occasionally lifting a few weights.

As the years passed, it began to seem remarkable to me that I had ever engaged in hours-long bouts of exercise. Eventually, I started wondering whether I still had the stamina to do it—even at a snail's pace, per doctor's orders.

That's when the old excitement returned. During Sunday's triathlon—a one-mile swim, 25-mile bike ride and 6.2-mile run—there were moments when I felt tempted to speed it up, usually to pass somebody. But mostly I resisted, allowing myself to turn it on only in sight of the finish line. After crossing it, I entered the medical tent and checked my heart rate: It was 97. My time was about 2:54. Next year I'm aiming for just over three hours.


Source:
http://www.globalaging.org/health/us/2009/Slower.htm

Prof. Cathy Greenblat’s Photo Exhibition in Mumbai “Living with Alzheimer’s”

On behalf of ARDSI (Alzheimer's & Related Disorders Society of India) we are pleased to inform you that during this year's (WAD) World Alzheimer’s Day 2009 extended programme we are organizing exhibition of Prof. Cathy’s photographs titles – “Living with Alzheimer’s”.

Prof. Cathy Greenblat is a world renowned photographer of people with dementia; has done several exhibition of her work across the globe and has won several awards. Two years ago she visited India and photographed some people with dementia. The author of 14 books and more than 100 articles Prof. Cathy Greenblat is Professor Emerita of Sociology at Rutgers University where she served for 35 years as a member of the Department of Sociology, Women’s Studies, and the Bloustein School of Planning.

Programme

Wed Sep 30th: 2pm to 4pm Presentation on "Seeing Dementia Differently” at Mini Auditorium, SVT College of Home Science, SNDT, Juhu Campus

Thu 1st Oct: 12.30 pm Presentation on 'Importance of Community Care for Dementia ‘ at full Day Programme of AISCCON (All India Confederation of Senior Citizens)on the occasion of World Elders Day programme at Vishnudas Bhave Natyagriha, Sector 16-A, Vashi, Navi Mumbai.

Fri 2nd Oct: 11am to 12.15 pm presentation on "Seeing Dementia Differently" at Shree Manav Seva Sangh , opp Gandhi Market, Sion.

Sat 3rd Oct: 3pm to 6pm Presentation on 'My Photograph for Dementia Care'. at Mini Auditorium, SNDT College, Juhu at World Elders Day programme of Silver Inning Foundation ' UMNAG' - the talent show for Elderly .Prof Cathy is Chief

Guest.

Mon 5th Oct: 3pm to 4.30 pm Presentation and Press Conference on 'Global Photo Documentation Experience of Dementia’ at Nalanda, Times Foundation, The Times of India Bldg, Dr,D.N.Road, Opp CST station, Mumbai – 400 001

5.30 to 6.45pm Presentation on ”Understanding Dementia Care through Photograph' at Harmony Center for Elderly at Thakurdwar ,Giragum, Mumbai.

Organised by

Alzheimer's & Related Disorders Society of India (ARDSI) in association with Silver Inning Foundation, Times Foundation, SVT College, AISCCON, Harmony for Silver Foundation and Shree Manav Seva Sangh

Contact:

Sailesh Mishra
Founder President - Silver Inning Foundation
Founder – ARDSI Greater Mumbai Chapter
Mobile: 0091 9819819145

Email: sailesh2000@gmail.com ; silverinnings@yahoo.co.in

www.silverinnings.com

World's Oldest Man Parties On 113th Birthday

The world's oldest man has celebrated his 113th birthday - revealing he takes one aspirin a day to stay healthy.

Walter Breuning celebrated his milestone with a party at his home in the Rainbow Retirement Community in Great Falls, Montana.

He told those gathered: "Remember that life's length is not measured by its hours and days, but by that which we have done therein.

"A useless life is short if it lasts a century.

"There are greater and better things in us all, if we would find them out. There will always be in this world - wrongs. No wrong is really successful.

"The day will come when light and truth and the just and the good shall be victorious and wrong as evil will be no more forever."

The 113-year-old, considered to be the world's oldest man, attributes his long life to eating well and keeping physically and mentally active.

He also says he takes one aspirin a day.

Mr Breuning is in such good shape that he still strolls the halls of the retirement home, wearing a suit and tie, and walks the ramps to his second-floor apartment.

He was born on September 21, 1896, in Melrose, Minnesota.

In 1912, he became a railway worker, which led him to Montana in 1918. He stayed in the job until retiring in 1963.

Mr Breuning has outlived all of his family.

He lost his wife in 1957 after 35 years of marriage - they did not have any children.

Source: http://uk.news.yahoo.com/5/20090922/tod-world-s-oldest-man-parties-on-113th-870a197.html