Saturday 10 August 2013

Warning of hardship if home gas price hike agreed

Groups representing consumers and older people say that a further hike in gas prices would cause more hardship if approved.

View full article

 

(unsubscribe from this feed)

Competition: Win a fantastic Body Shop Hamper

Enter our competition to win a fantastic Body Shop Hamper! Body Shop products are sourced from some of the finest raw ingredients from across the world, traded fairly and never tested on Animals. T...

View full article

 

(unsubscribe from this feed)

Letter: Care of older people

The early findings of the Equality and Human Rights Commission inquiry into the treatment of older people receiving care in their homes ( Report , 20 June) reveal the shocking treatment of the elderly. Sadly, however, they should not come as a surprise to the government, which was warned that funding for adult social care was inadequate. The Association of Directors of Adult Social Services ...

View full article

 

(unsubscribe from this feed)

Shock as care services for older people are cut

A £150m cut in spending on social care services for older people in England was revealed today by the Department of Health's information centre. It said local authorities spent £8.77bn on care for vulnerable pensioners in 2007-08, a cut of 1.7% in real terms on the year before. The cut came before councils began wrestling with financial pressures caused by the economic recession, which has ...

View full article

 

(unsubscribe from this feed)

Charity criticises cancer care for older people

Macmillan Cancer Support says cancer mortality rates for older people improving more slowly than for younger patients Cancer mortality rates among older people are failing to match the improvements seen in younger patients, Macmillan Cancer Support warns today. Under-treatment and a failure to properly consider the effects of age are to blame, and if mortality rates for the over-75s were reduced ...

View full article

 

(unsubscribe from this feed)

Intra-individual reaction time variability and all-cause mortality over 17 years: a community-based cohort study

Background: very few studies have examined the association between intra-individual reaction time variability and subsequent mortality. Furthermore, the ability of simple measures of variability to predict mortality has not been compared with more complex measures.

Method: a prospective cohort study of 896 community-based Australian adults aged 70+ were interviewed up to four times from 1990 to 2002, with vital status assessed until June 2007. From this cohort, 770–790 participants were included in Cox proportional hazards regression models of survival. Vital status and time in study were used to conduct survival analyses. The mean reaction time and three measures of intra-individual reaction time variability were calculated separately across 20 trials of simple and choice reaction time tasks. Models were adjusted for a range of demographic, physical health and mental health measures.

Results: greater intra-individual simple reaction time variability, as assessed by the raw standard deviation (raw SD), coefficient of variation (CV) or the intra-individual standard deviation (ISD), was strongly associated with an increased hazard of all-cause mortality in adjusted Cox regression models. The mean reaction time had no significant association with mortality.

Conclusion: intra-individual variability in simple reaction time appears to have a robust association with mortality over 17 years. Health professionals such as neuropsychologists may benefit in their detection of neuropathology by supplementing neuropsychiatric testing with the straightforward process of testing simple reaction time and calculating raw SD or CV.

View full article

 

(unsubscribe from this feed)