Chicago's Geriatric Care Manager Center of Excellence – Since 1991 • In Home CaregiverChicago's Geriatric Care Manager Center of Excellence

Making Your Holidays Happy Again
Yes, “holidays” is a plural word here. Please allow me to digress on this plurality and simply point out...
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November 16, 2021
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Not Just Spring…
We’ve heard of Spring Training for those who follow baseball teams like the CUBS or the SOX, and we...
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April 13, 2021
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Can I Have A Hug?
I doubt there is anyone who does not have something that they have not been able to do during...
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March 4, 2021
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COVID’s Other Deadly Toll
During this pandemic, over 13,000 more Alzheimer’s and other dementia patients have died than expected from these cognitive disorders,...
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September 22, 2020
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Dementia: We’re Not Post-COVID Yet
If you have a family member or loved one with dementia, this pandemic and its restrictions have been exponentially...
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May 26, 2020
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Distance Caregiving Through a Wall
I’ve written numerous times about distance caregiving, and one of the observations I have offered is that distance is...
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May 19, 2020
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Caregiving During COVID: Four Tips for Reengagement
You may recall that I have recommended limiting your news consumption, because it really does add to our stressed...
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May 12, 2020
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Tips for Distance Caregiving: Up Close and Personal at a Distance
If you think being a caregiver to an older loved one is hard–with all the trips to help them...
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February 4, 2020
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Caregivers and their Medicare?
Yes, you read it right. I am posting this one about what caregivers should know about their Medicare. But...
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September 12, 2013
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In the Caregiver's Words

Recent Client Praise

The Covid-19 pandemic and quarantine are receding in our collective rearview mirrors, but there are some lasting and devastating effects that remain…and they aren’t health-related. We have talked about how isolating the pandemic was, especially for older adults who may have been single during this quarantine. Beyond the unfortunate older adults whose communities may have been ravaged by the virus, the number of older adults who have been and may continue to be exploited financially has seen a sharp upturn. In a recent survey reported by The American Journal of Geriatric Psychiatry, the incidence of financial abuse among older adults has doubled during the pandemic. More than 21 percent of older adults reported some form of financial abuse or scamming during the quarantine which is double the one in ten rate of reported financial abuse in the period before the COVID-19 outbreak. What is all the more troubling is the fact that these are just the individuals who reported being scammed. Given that many financial abuse cases go unreported or unrecognized, we may now be in a continued pandemic of a financial sort among older Americans. Many older adults are relatively easy prey to those who will exploit their social isolation and the prospect that no one is looking out for their well-being while we were all maintaining distance to avoid spreading the virus. It could be a long lost school classmate of mom or dad, or maybe another individual whose work brought them in contact with a lonely senior. If you have an older loved one with whom you are now reestablishing contact, it is important that you help with a financial security check up. If you are not a legal power of attorney, you will have to be delicate about questions, but you can still look for signs of abuse:
- Have their been any changes to estate planning documents?
- Any purchases that seem unusual by their dollar amount or nature?
- Has your loved one been making more trips to the ATM for withdrawals?
- Have any bills gone unpaid?
- Any new credit cards arriving in their mail?
- Has your loved one talked about time spent with a “new friend?”
- Are their any pieces or art or family heirlooms missing?
With all of these, it may not be a stranger who is perpetrating the fraud on your older loved one; it may be a niece, nephew, child or grandchild or neighbor. Be prepared for your loved one to be perhaps indignant if you suggest anything, and be prepared to reach out to a community department of Senior Services. You also can find an accredited Elder Law Attorney by way of their National Association. Elder abuse is an epidemic for which there is no vaccine. Local law enforcement departments also have community outreach offices to help. Charlotte Bishop is a Caregiver Coach, an Aging Life Care Advisor, a Geriatric Care Manager and founder of Creative Care Management, certified professionals who are geriatric advocates, resources, counselors and friends to older adults and their families in metropolitan Chicago. She also is the co-author of How Do I Know You? A Caregiver’s Lifesaver for Dealing with Dementia.
I have again asked our vice president for senior services, Steve Steiber, Ph.D. to share a guest posting about the recent news on prescribing for patients with high cholesterol. He has nearly two decades experience in pharmaceutical and medical device consulting prior to joining CCM about 8 years ago. He reports: This week the American Heart Association and the American College of Cardiology issued new guidelines on what patients should be prescribed medication to lower their cholesterol. If followed, these guidelines could double the number of patients receiving prescriptions for the most common medications called statins. You may be familiar with the drugs with names like Crestor, Tricor, Lipitor or Zetia. The reason more people may receive prescriptions is that while the guidelines do not change the target "bad cholesterol" (LDL) level, it looks to other risk factors. The old rules just looked at the level of "bad cholesterol" in a patient's blood. The new guidelines look at other classic risk factors, such as:
- patients with type 2 diabetes between ages 40 and 75 and who have LDL levels at or above 190;
- patients with a cardiovascular risk 7.5 percent or higher between ages 40 and 75 and who have LDL levels at or above 190.
It really comes down to the risk factors first and the cholesterol level second when a prescribing decision is made. It used to be just by the numbers - the LDL numbers - regardless of cardiovascular risk or diabetic condition. So people with elevated LDL, but minimal risk factors may not receive a prescription. The new rules translate into about 33 million adult Americans receiving prescriptions for statins-caregivers and their older loved ones. About 44 percent of adult men would qualify, but only about 22 percent of women would be prescribed a statin. Under the old guidelines, only about half as many adults would have received a prescription. Please let Steve know if you have any questions about drugs, their side effects or the unique medical challenges faced by older adults or others with special needs. Please email to: Steve Steiber.
In the meantime, we invite you to download the below featured FREE white paper - offering both personal and professional advice for those who care for the elderly or people with special needs. Make sure to come back and visit us for more great FREE resources.

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Please consider what I am sharing with you here to be the raw material side of recommending some recipes for your upcoming Thanksgiving feast. By raw materials, I mean that these recommendations are not recipes, strictly speaking, but I am recommending your feast this week have ample quantities of vitamins D and E. In fact, you might carry these doses over into your regular diet after this week. If you are like most folks who have been following advice on healthy eating, you already appreciate that vitamin D is very important for bone health and vitamin E is central to heart health. But what you may not have seen is that both of these also are important to brain health. Separate studies have shown that vitamin E can help to keep Alzheimer's at bay and vitamin D can lower the risk of cognitive decline. Starting with the case for vitamin E, researchers at New York State University have studied the effect of regular quantities of walnuts (rich in vitamin E) on what they termed "Alzheimer's-susceptible mice." Granted, these are animal studies, but the nutrition needs of mammals can be generalized to some extent. And their results published just this month were quite striking. The group of mice in their experiment who consumed regular doses of walnuts showed statistically significant improvement in learning, memory, motor skills and even anxiety levels over the mice who received no walnuts. (How do they measure anxiety in mice?) No surprise that walnuts contain Omega-3 fatty acids as well as other antioxidants which have been proven in other studies to ward off cognitive decline. And then there is vitamin D. This was a study among older Italian adults rather than mice. The researchers tracked vitamin D levels of nearly 2,000 adults whose average age was 73.9 years for over four years. They found that those individuals with vitamin D deficiency or insufficiency (measured by their serum 25OHD) were more likely to have declining cognitive skills as measured by a standard test called the "Mini-Mental State Examination." This was compared to their baseline test at the outset of the study which showed all participants to begin at comparable and robust levels of mental ability. It is important to note that this second study simply noted the differences among individuals based on their blood serum levels and did not control what they ate. More testing will be needed to see if vitamin supplements can make a positive difference versus in mental capacity. And, of course, the first study was on mice, so it would be helpful to move this up to humans. And by the way, the amount humans would consume to give the equivalent dose for what the mice ate would be only about 1-1.5 ounces of walnuts daily. So, if you are a caregiver to an older loved one this holiday, these two studies may not include any recipes, per se, but they do suggest what you may wish to add to your Thanksgiving spread as well as the dinners that will follow. And you don't have to choose between these two vitamins; cover your bets by adding a bit of D and a bit of E. Charlotte Bishop is a Geriatric Care Manager and founder of Creative Care Management, certified professionals who are geriatric advocates, resources, counselors and friends to older adults and their families in metropolitan Chicago. Please email your questions to info@creativecaremanagement.com.
This is the first in a series of posts on dementia in advance of the release of my new book, "How Do I Know You? A Caregiver’s Lifesaver for Dealing with Dementia." It will be released in July through Family Solutions Press of Los Angeles and available from Amazon. We will keep you up to date on details. Count slowly from one to sixty-seven…one thousand one, one thousand two, one thousand three…by the time you reach one thousand sixty-seven, one more person in the United States will have been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease. In fact, one in three Americans ultimately will die with Alzheimer’s disease. And when we interviewed nearly three dozen Professional Care Managers in 2016 and 2017 dementia was the most common issue they dealt with among their clients– more than 66% of their cases. There have been new diagnostic breakthroughs and some pharmacological, nutritional and other ways that have proposed to help slow the progression of this disease, but the fact is that they have no substantial or durable effect. Alzheimer’s remains the only disease in the top ten causes of death in the United States that cannot be prevented, cured or slowed. Dementia is a category that includes about 100 specific cognitive conditions. Generally speaking, most dementias are diagnoses of exclusion. That is medical talk for the fact that one narrows down what a person is manifesting by successive steps of eliminating other possible explanations for a behavior. For instance, a medical work-up when dementia is suspected will include a review of all the medications a patient may be taking. Some medications have a pronounced effect on a person’s memory, noteworthy among them most of the sleep aids such as diphenhydramine, or Benadryl. Yet, this typically results in memory lapses that will recede if the medication is stopped. Doctors now also talk about “risk factors” for dementia that they place into three major categories. The first they tie to “body composition.” Simply put, what physicians have noted is that people with more fatty tissue, or a higher Body Mass Index (BMI), is associated with more amyloid deposits on the brain, a precursor of Alzheimer’s. The second set of risk factors center on “inflammatory processes.” Increased blood levels of sugar and cholesterol are associated with higher risk of dementia as well as heart disease…something of a double hit. Finally physicians also look at how well a person scores on “cognitive tests.” Dementia often is thought of as forgetfulness, but it really is the inability to process information and make a retrievable memory. They have cognitive tests that can measure that, one of which they call the Mini-Mental Test. A person’s cognitive health also is enhanced by creative pass times like playing a musical instrument, taking adult education or actively engaging in stress reduction. In my book, we cover what we know about dementia, what can be done to stave off the effects of dementia and most importantly what caregivers can do for their loved ones with dementia and for themselves. Charlotte Bishop is a Geriatric Care Manager and founder of Creative Care Management, certified professionals who are geriatric advocates, resources, counselors and friends to older adults and their families in metropolitan Chicago.