Older Men at the Margins was a two-year study to understand how men aged 65 and over from different social backgrounds and circumstances experienced loneliness and social isolation. It also explored the formal and informal ways they sought to stay connected with others and feel less lonely.
Conclusions: Older adults are motivated to use digital technologies to improve their mental health, but barriers remain that developers need to address for this population to access them.
Understanding the circumstances associated with feeling lonely and explaining what we know works in supporting people to tackle feelings of persistent loneliness.
dentifying frail older people, and in particular, people who are psychologically frail in a community setting is difficult. This article investigates predictors of psychological frailty and constructs a short and effective pre-detection tool for highly psychologically frail older people. To read the full article, log in using your NHS OpenAthens details.
The Government’s Loneliness Strategy will be its first step in tackling the long-term challenge of loneliness. Loneliness is a complex issue that affects many different groups of people, and its evidence base is still developing.
Our approach is to focus the Strategy where we have the clearest opportunity for government action and further learning. Alongside this we will also be working with partners to explore how we can improve the evidence base, to inform future government policy.
“We found that older participants experienced beneficial effects of green space whilst walking between busy built urban environments and urban green space environments. Indeed, this work is the first to be published in a series of papers understanding the impact of green and urban spaces on brain activity in older adults.
The Local Government Association, which represents more than 370 councils in England and Wales, says that the impact of loneliness and isolation on health and social care means that it must be recognised as a major public health issue.
There are thought to be more than one million people aged over 65 who are lonely – around 10-13 per cent of older people. But this is likely to only increase as people live for longer, councils are warning.
This quality standard covers interventions to maintain and improve the mental wellbeing and independence of people aged 65 or older, and how to identify those at risk of a decline. It describes high-quality care in priority areas for improvement. It does not cover the mental wellbeing and independence of people who live in a care home or attend one on a day-only basis.
Nearly a third of people with mild cognitive impairment also have depression, a systematic review and meta-analysis has shown.1
Depression has previously been thought to be common in people with mild cognitive impairment, who show greater decline in cognitive function than expected with normal ageing but not to the level of cognitive loss in dementia. Evidence has shown a link between having depression and increased progression to dementia, so the researchers sought to understand this more fully. To read the full article, log in using your NHS OpenAthens details
This resource is intended for local authority and clinical commissioning groups to identify what types of interventions they should focus on to help the uptake and maintenance of healthy behaviours and promote cognitive health among older adults living in the community.
It is also intended for providers of lifestyle behaviour change programmes to support the development of evidence-informed prevention packages for older adults.
Neighbourhood resources may preserve functional independence in older adults, but little is known about whether benefits differ for individuals with normal and impaired memory. We evaluated the extent to which neighbourhood context was related to onset of instrumental and basic activities of daily living (I/ADL) limitations and whether relationships were modified by memory impairment. To read the full article, log in using your NHS OpenAthens details
The study's main limitation is that this can't prove cause and effect, or tell the direction of the relationship. People who volunteer may have better health scores because those who feel healthy, active and in a good state of wellbeing are more likely to go out and volunteer to help others than those who feel in poor health. It's not necessarily the case that the reverse is true; that volunteering has caused the good health state.
It could be that the association works both ways – better wellbeing probably makes you more inclined to help others, and helping others probably boosts your sense of wellbeing.
Researcher Vasiliki Tzouvara will be presenting the results of her study into loneliness among nursing home residents at the RCN international nursing research conference in Edinburgh. She believes more initiatives should be targeted at this population. To read the full article, log in using your NHS OpenAthens details
In 2010, we interviewed 16 UK centenarians about their lives and later published a paper on the socio-emotional aspects of positive ageing. We were struck by their ability to ‘move on’ from difficult situations which we recognized conceptually as ‘resilience’. In the effort to understand aspects of resilience as portrayed in their stories, we re-examined their data.
Two £25 vouchers are up for grabs in the library’s ‘Making the Most of Information’ survey.
To take part, just visit http://goo.gl/AdN4ok by Friday 19th February.
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