Little is known about the extent to which advanced activities of daily living among patients with dementia are preserved and how family caregivers of these patients support them in the community. In this cross-sectional assessment of pairs of patients with dementia and their family caregivers, we evaluated basic, instrumental, and advanced activities of daily living by comparing past and presen...

Little is known about pathways to homelessness among older adults. We identified life course experiences associated with earlier versus later onset of homelessness in older homeless adults and examined current health and functional status by age at first homelessness. We interviewed 350 homeless adults, aged 50 and older, recruited via population-based sampling. Participants reported age at fir...

THE use of formal devices for assessing function is becoming standard in agencies serving the elderly. In the Gerontological Society's recent contract study on functional assessment (Howell, 1968), a large assortment of rating scales, checklists, and other techniques in use in applied settings was easily assembled. The present state of the trade seems to be one in which each investigator or pra...

Research suggests that performance on cognitive tasks resembling daily challenges (i.e., everyday problem-solving tasks) may be a better indicator of functional ability in old age compared to traditional measures of cognitive ability. Findings demonstrating this link, however, have yielded mixed results. The current study examined performance on the Everyday Problems Test (EPT) and self-reporte...

The aim of this study was to investigate the cohort differences in physical functioning levels among the older (cohort members born in 1916-1926 and in 1927-1937) participants of the Bambuí Cohort Study of Aging. The data came from participants aged 71-81 who took part at baseline in 1997 (n = 491) and in the 11th wave in 2008 (n = 620). The physical functioning variables included the following...

Fear of falling is associated with self-imposed restrictions of basic and instrumental activities of daily living (ADL/IADL), leading greater risk for functional decline and falls. The inability to independently grocery shop, a food-related IADL, negatively affects nutritional status and survival among seniors. Thus, this study examined the relationship between the fear of falling and difficult...

An Advanced Distributed Learning environment needs to extend beyond technical drivers to pedagogical and organizational dimensions that focus on the interaction between the learner and the learning environment. In fact, effective e-learning resources can not only be used to compliment faceto-face education or replace the classroom for distance education, but can facilitate the integration of st...