Older Adults Related Content

Everything You Need To Know About Older Adult Mental Health

The world is aging. According to the World Health Organization, we can expect the over-60 population to double worldwide between 2015 and 2050. Considering 15% of these individuals struggle with some form of mental health disorder, and that neurological and mental issues account for more than 6% of...

A Living Lab for Dementia Caregivers

A wife had been caring for her husband with dementia at home for four years. She had come to McLean’s geriatric outpatient clinic to find out where to get more help for him. But it soon became apparent that she needed help herself. She was lonely and struggling with making decisions on her own. Her...

McLean Team Selected To Be Part of New Model To Transform Dementia Care

Dementia affected more than 6.7 million Americans in 2023, with 14 million cases projected in the U.S. by 2060. For millions of caregivers of people living with dementia, there is a longstanding gap in resources and best practices to support this population. As part of a new voluntary nationwide...

Video: Helping Older Adults Manage Alzheimer’s and Other Dementias

It’s a fact of life that our brains change as we grow older, and as they do, we might notice some subtle differences in the way they work. Aging adults are often increasingly prone to misplacing items or struggling to recall something from the past, for example. These shifts are natural and pose no...

Improving Quality of Life for Patients Starts With Supporting Caregivers

Dementia. The mere mention of cognitive decline is usually enough to send chills down the spines of older Americans and their family members. While there is broad recognition of the devastating impact of living with illnesses that include symptoms affecting memory and thinking, such as Alzheimer’s...

Using New Technology to Track Senior Health

Mounted on the wall in David’s room at an assisted living facility west of Boston is a small, white box. It emits a low hum, but otherwise, it is hard to know it is there. But, while people in the room may not notice the box, the box is noticing everything that goes on in the room. The box houses a...

Video: Assessment and Prevention of Suicide in Older Adults

Presented by Yeates Conwell, MD, University of Rochester Medical Center In this talk, Conwell outlines special aspects of suicide in older adults, and the issues that make suicide in this population challenging to address. He provides a framework that conceptualizes the topic and suggests treatment...

Beloved Nurse Director Cindy Ruscitti, MSN, RN, Retires

On October 30, 2020, a beloved and respected nurse retired from McLean Hospital. Cindy Ruscitti, MSN, RN, the Older Adult Program’s nurse director, started working at McLean as a staff nurse on December 3, 1975. And—fortunately for its staff and patients—she continued to work at McLean for more than...

How Are Older Adults Coping With the Mental Health Effects of COVID-19?

Older adults are especially vulnerable to the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic—with higher risks of severe complications and death, and potentially greater difficulties accessing care and adapting to technologies such as telemedicine. A viewpoint article published in the Journal of the American...

New Possibilities for Parkinson’s Disease

A team of investigators from McLean Hospital and Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) reported that reprogramming a patient’s own skin cells to replace cells in the brain that are progressively lost during Parkinson’s disease (PD) is technically feasible. PD is the second most common...

Dementia: Addressing a Global Health Challenge

As Americans age and the incidence of dementia increases, McLean Hospital is embarking on a path to provide more specialized care for a subset of patients with the behavioral problems that accompany the advanced stages of the illness. According to the World Health Organization, mental health and...

Device Allows Clinicians to Safely Monitor Older Adults With COVID-19

Even with the best protocols in place, treating psychiatric patients who have tested positive for COVID-19 poses challenges for mental health care professionals. But what if there was a way to monitor patients from a safe distance? A team of clinicians from McLean Hospital’s Division of Geriatric...