Blog
Making an Emergency Preparation Plan? Don’t Forget Heat Waves!
Posted on July 22, 2019 - This is the time of year when our attention turns to natural disasters. The U.S. has already experienced our first hurricane this year. Summer brings tornadoes throughout the nation’s midsection. And a series of earthquakes recently struck the West. Time to make our emergency preparation kit and plan our evacuation route, just in case! But did you know that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) lists extreme heat as the most deadly of all natural disasters in the U.S.? Heat waves take the lives of more people than all other natural disasters combined.
Americans 60 and older are spending more time in front of their screens than a decade ago
Posted on July 17, 2019 - The amount of time that Americans ages 60 and older spend on their TVs, computers, tablets or other electronic devices has risen almost half an hour per day over the past decade, according to a Pew Research Center analysis of Bureau of Labor Statistics data, even as screen time among younger people has more or less held steady.
Want to Feel Better About Yourself? Try Feeling Better About Others.
Posted on July 15, 2019 - These days, it seems that good feelings about other people can be in short supply! Political battles, sniping in Facebook comments, and trolls on news sites can make us all feel a little prickly, judgmental and self-focused. But according to a March 2019 study from Iowa State University (ISU), improving our feelings toward other people may be one of the best ways to improve our own mood.
Medicare fraud alert: Scammers are offering unneeded genetic tests to get your personal information
Posted on July 10, 2019 - Scammers have been offering Medicare beneficiaries cheek swabs they say are for genetic tests as a way to gather personal information, which can then be used for identity theft or fraudulent billing, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Office of Inspector General announced this week.
Denial All Around: Many Avoiding the Conversation About Alzheimer’s Disease
Posted on July 9, 2019 - University of Michigan experts recently released a study titled “Thinking About Brain Health,” in which they polled people in their 50s and early 60s about their thoughts about dementia. They found that people worry about memory loss a lot. Almost 50% of the people polled believed that they themselves were likely to develop serious memory and cognitive loss as they aged, due to Alzheimer’s disease, vascular dementia or other conditions—but in reality, only 20% of older adults will deal with these conditions.
