Elderly cancer patients need a combination of treatments tailor-made to their specific needs to successfully combat the disease. The challenge is to boost their immune response to cancer vaccines, because like the rest of our organs, our immune system ages and gradually becomes less efficient as we get older. Dr. Joseph Lustgarten, from the Mayo Clinic College of Medicine in the US, reviews the ef...

When most people think of insulin, they think of diabetes — a disease that arises when, for one reason or another, insulin can`t do the critical job of helping the body process sugar. But the hormone has another, less well-known function. It`s also necessary for muscle growth, increasing blood flow through muscle tissue, encouraging nutrients to disperse from blood vessels and itself serving...

Exposure to carbon monoxide, even at levels well below national limits, is associated with an increased risk of hospitalization for the elderly with heart problems, according to a study published in Circulation: Journal of the American Heart Association. The nationwide study of 126 urban communities, funded by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the National Institute of Environmental He...

A team of researchers from the University of Granada (UGR) has created a system with Artificial Intelligence techniques which notifies elderly people or people with special needs of the forgetting of certain everyday tasks. This system uses sensors distributed in the environment in order to detect their actions and mobile devices which remind them, for example, to take their keys before they leave...

Older adults who have less strength, poor physical function and low muscle density are at higher risk of being hospitalized compared to adults with more strength and better function. That`s the finding of a new study in the Journal of the American Geriatric Society. The study also found that muscle density, a measure of how much fat compared to lean tissue there is in the muscle, is a more accurat...

New UCLA research suggests that for seniors age 70 and older, socioeconomic status does not play a major role in the brain`s continued ability to function. However, seniors who have never been married and widowers seem to perform more poorly as they age. Previous studies on age-related cognitive decline have not adequately clarified the role demographics and socioeconomic status might play in the ...

Sleep disturbances increase as we age. Some studies report more than half of seniors 65 years of age or older suffer from chronic sleep disturbances. Researchers have long believed that the sleep disturbances common among the elderly often result from a disruption of the body’s circadian rhythms — biological cycles that repeat approximately every 24 hours. In recent...

Elderly people who live below the poverty line and perceive their neighborhoods to be dangerous are more likely to have a mobility disability. Researchers suggest that even perceiving one`s neighborhood as unsafe can `get into the body` and, ultimately, prove hazardous for elder health. Cheryl Clark MD, ScD, from Brigham and Women`s Hospital, Boston, led a team of researchers who studied 1,884 peo...

Hyperkyphosis, or "dowager`s hump" — the exaggerated forward curvature of the upper spine seen commonly in elderly women — may predict earlier death in women whether or not they have vertebral osteoporosis, UCLA researchers have found. In a study published in the May 19 issue of Annals of Internal Medicine, researchers found that older white women with both vertebral fracture...

A new tool can help predict whether people age 65 and older have a high risk of developing Alzheimer`s disease. Research on the tool is published in the May 13, 2009, online issue of Neurology®, the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology. "This new risk index could be very important both for research and for people at risk of developing dementia and their families," sai...