As the country reopens and stay-at-home orders are eased, the risk to seniors from COVID-19 may increase. While the curve has flattened in some parts of the country, infected people still inhabit every state. Since a large percentage of individuals who carry the coronavirus have no symptoms — and may never develop symptoms — it […]
The holiday season can make people contemplative. And quite often, it can also inspire them to accomplish one of life’s many “Shoulds” — getting affairs in order such as completing advance health care directives and final arrangements. But for many, those tasks seem daunting. Or confusing. Or just plain not fun. Until now. The Coda […]
Most adults will lose at least 30% of their muscle mass during their lifetimes. That frightening truth even has a scary-sounding name: sarcopenia — literally translated as the even scarier sounding “poverty of the flesh.” The “poverty” actually begins for most people around age 30. At that point, even individuals who are physically active will […]
Updated December 2025 Even avowed Luddites can’t claim to be totally immune to the way older people are portrayed online — when you can find them there at all: a bit feeble, immobile, badly dressed, and all alone or in the company of a doctor or caregiver. And a recent study strongly confirmed that’s not […]
More than 15 years after it was passed, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA) — also glowingly or disparagingly referred to as “Obamacare,” depending on a person’s politics — has become a pawn, another arrow in the arsenal of weapons brandished between liberals and conservatives, legislators of all stripes, consumers and insurers. And […]
The Age-In. It was something of a flashback — modeled after the Teach-Ins of the 1960s, which were characterized by peer-to-peer talking and listening sessions rather than the more formalized “I’m-gonna-lecture-and-you’re-gonna-listen” teacher/student set-up. The event commemorated the 10-year anniversary of At Home With Growing Older, a group with a diverse membership of architects, advocates, social […]
There is no shortage of advice these days about how to deal with the “problem behavior” of people who have dementia, many of whom get more resistant as their conditions decline. Many of those urgings seem impossible to follow; some of them too wonky, too time-consuming or too expensive. In fact, the best advice may […]
Old age is getting younger. Thanks to a decrease in smoking, improved healthcare, safer working conditions, and widespread childhood vaccinations, life expectancy in the United States increased during most years after World War I and the 1918 flu pandemic. The increase in American life expectancy flattened in the mid-2010s because of the opioid epidemic and […]