Even though Medicare covers the cost of cardiac rehabilitation, less than one in five senior citizens follow through with the beneficial therapy after a heart attack or open-heart surgery, researchers have found.

Among Medicare beneficiaries age 65 or older, women were less likely to participate than men. Also, study subjects at the older end of the spectrum were less likely than younger people to take part. In addition, non-whites were significantly less likely than whites to follow through with the rehab, according to researchers at Brandeis University in Waltham, MA.

Investigators, who evaluated Medicare claims data on 267,427 men and women age 65 or older, said that available cardiac rehabilitation programs should be promoted to all patients after a cardiac hospitalization. They found that in the year following hospital discharge, less than 19% of patients in the study had been to at least one session of cardiac rehabilitation. Patients who had had bypass surgery were far more likely (31%) to receive rehabilitation than patients who had had a heart attack (14%).

The study is reported in Circulation: Journal of the American Heart Association.
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September 25, 2007

Calcium still the key to fracture prevention in aging women, study finds

Maintaining a steady dietary intake of calcium offers the greatest protection against broken hips in elderly women, and it also protects against forearm fractures early in menopause, new research suggests.

Calcium intake strongly protected against hip fractures in the more than 9,000 post-menopausal women who were examined, according to researchers from Finland.

The researchers tracked and analyzed the amount of dairy product in the diet and used the information as a measure of the participants' calcium intake. The average calcium intake was 827 milligrams per day and remained essentially the same as the women aged during the 15-year study.

The findings were presented recently during the 29th annual meeting of the American Society for Bone and Mineral Research.
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September 24, 2007

Study: Low-calorie diets fight aging process

The key to living longer may involve calorie deprivation, a new study suggests. But humans might able to find the same effects in a pill form.

Laboratory animals that are fed very low-calorie diets live longer. These findings might help scientists develop a pill that leads to longevity, say researchers at Harvard Medical School, Cornell University and the U.S. National Institutes of Health.

Researchers discovered that fasting, or limiting caloric intake, raises levels of certain proteins that activate two specific genes in the cell mitochondria. The two genes may be potential drug targets in an effort to combat diseases associated with aging and to slow down the aging process, they said. The study was published in the journal Cell.
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September 11, 2007

Better depression treatment could ease impact of chronic illness: study

Depression exacerbates problems associated with other illness, new study findings suggest.

Depression can be more damaging to everyday health than chronic diseases, including angina, arthritis, asthma and diabetes, according to investigators for the World Health Organization. Depression actually worsens the chronic condition of people who are already ill, they found.

The findings suggests the need better treatment for depression since it has such a strong impact on overall health, and especially people with chronic illnesses, investigators said. They analyzed data from 60 countries and more than 240,000 people to reach their findings.
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September 6, 2007

Study: Older smokers 50% more likely to get dementia, Alzheimer's

Seniors who smoke are significantly more likely to develop forms of dementia or Alzheimer's disease than those who don't, or those who quit in the past, Dutch researchers say.

There is a 50% increase in likelihood of Alzheimer's for older smokers, they concluded. Researchers studied 7,000 individuals 55 and older over a seven-year period to compile their findings.

"Smoking increases the risk of cerebrovascular disease, which is also tied to dementia," said study author Monique Breteler, MD, PhD, of Erasmus Medical Center in Rotterdam. Her study is published in the Tuesday's issue of Neurology, the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology.