Researchers at McGill University in Montreal found that patients with home care after emergency hip replacement had a 43% lower death rate than those sent home without a program.

Elderly patients given formal home care after a hip replacement due to a fall have a lower risk of dying within a few months after leaving hospital compared to those who don’t get such follow-up services, a study suggests.

The lead author notes that often times the caretaker lives with the elderly patient and is as old as they are.

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A full 59% of those providing unpaid care to another adult also work full-  or part-time.

Of those, 62% have had to make adjustments to their work lives as a result of their caregiving responsibilities.

To listen to our Care Manager Connection, “Freeing Two Daughters from Caregiving Responsibilities,” click here.

Falls are the leading cause of injury deaths for older adults. They are also the most common cause of nonfatal injuries for seniors and hospital admissions for trauma.

For more details, click here.

Do you have an interesting fact about seniors or senior care to share? Please email it to info@livhome.com and we may use it in a future “Did You Know” post.

Most seniors know this instinctively: the older you get, the less sleep you need.

Now, a new study in the journal SLEEP has found that during an 8-hour night in bed, total sleep time fell significantly and progressively as the subjects got older.  Older adults slept about 20 minutes less than middle-aged adults, who slept 23 minutes less than young adults.

Healthy senior citizens without sleep disorders can expect to have a reduced “sleep need” and to be less sleepy during the day than healthy young adults.

Nutrition (tastes, habits) is another area that changes with age.  To hear our Nutrition for Seniors episode of The Senior Care Podcast by LivHOME, please click here.

Here’s an interesting update on the Alzheimer’s front.  Researcher have found that elderly people with a strong sense of purpose in life are almost 2½ times less likely to develop Alzheimer’s disease.

These findings come from a study published in the March issue of Archives of General Psychiatry.

“Our results suggest that positive factors, such as having a sense of goal-directedness that guides behavior, may provide a buffer against negative health outcomes, particularly in old age.”

For more on Alzheimer’s, please listen to the following topics on The Senior Care Podcast by LivHOME:

• Brain Aerobics
• Advances in Alzheimer’s Research