Bad for older people.
The Wall Street Journal is talking sense here…
That sense of urgency is understandable. The nation’s sprawling suburbs—home to as much as half of the U.S. population and more than 30 million people age 55-plus—may have been a good place to grow up. But the suburbs are proving a tough place to grow old.
Indeed, as the country ages, suburbia’s widely assumed benefits—privacy, elbow room, affordability—tend to vanish. Maintaining yards and homes requires more effort; driving everywhere, and for everything, becomes expensive and, eventually, impossible. (Research shows that men and women who reach their 70s, on average, outlive their ability to drive by six and 10 years, respectively.)
Suburbs are creatures of the car. To the extent that older people are forced to depend on cars for transportation, their mobility and independence are at risk.
Suddenly, “all that privacy that drew people to the suburbs in the first place can become isolation,” says Ellen Dunham-Jones, associate professor of architecture and urban design at Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta.
One answer, of course, is to leave. Active-adult communities and assisted-living facilities exist to mitigate some of the drawbacks of growing old on a cul-de-sac. That said, the vast majority of older adults don’t want to move. Fully 85% of surveyed individuals age 50-plus told AARP, the Washington-based advocacy group, that they wish to remain in their communities for as long as possible. And those communities, invariably, want the same thing: a strong mix of ages, interests and abilities among residents.
The Whole Article is Excellent.
LSU identifies community conditions related to malnutrition deaths among
older adults
BATON ROUGE – In a paper published in the May 2010 issue of the
scholarly journal Annals of Epidemiology, two LSU researchers tackle a
problem seldom acknowledged in the United States – the incidence of
malnutrition-related deaths among older adults. Matthew Lee, professor
of sociology and Provost Fellow in the Office of Research and Economic
Development and his co-author Emily Berthelot, a doctoral candidate in
sociology, argue that while malnutrition related deaths are primarily
found among infants in the developing world, such cases are actually
concentrated among older adults in the United States.
In "Community Covariates of Malnutrition Based Mortality Among Older
Adults," Lee and Berthelot analyze data from more than 3,100 counties in
the United States on older adult malnutrition morality using data from
the Centers for Disease Control and U.S. Census on the social and
economic characteristics of these counties. In statistical analyses, the
researchers found that two constructs are related to high rates of older
adult malnutrition death rates across counties: socioeconomic and
physical disadvantages, and social isolation.
Specifically, they found that where levels of education are low among
older adults, poverty is high, rates of disability are high, there is
limited access to telephones or where older adults are more likely to
live alone or be widowed, the rates of death by malnutrition are
significantly higher.
The authors suggest that poverty and related factors are associated with
malnutrition death rates because poverty limits resources to purchase
food, causing people to buy cheaper and hence less nutritious items.
Likewise, being socially isolated can be harmful because social supports
can affect psychosocial well-being and foster healthier behaviors.
"The fact that 2,000 to 3,000 people a year die due to
malnutrition-related causes in the U.S. beckons the need for additional
research on this important threat to public health," said Lee. "Our
study, being the first of its kind, will hopefully prompt other
researchers to begin examining this problem more closely."
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n:May2010/ leeberthelotmalnutrition.ab
More news and information can be found on LSU's home page at www.lsu.edu
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2010-05/lsu-lic051210.php
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