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Alzheimer’s and Personal Care Choices
For those of us with Alzheimer’s, making our needs and desires known becomes increasingly more difficult as the illness progresses. With Alzheimers personal care choices and needs will change over time. Making our personal care choices known while we are still able to understand their meaning can reduce stress and improve our quality of life as we ease into later years. Advanced dementia, including Alzheimer’s disease, is the sixth leading cause of death overall in the United States. It is the fifth leading cause for people over 65, and the third for those over 85. Yet once the disease approaches its terminal stages, patients are unable to communicate their desires for or against…
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Researchers Find that Cancer Patients who Discharge from Hospice have Increased Hospitalizations and are less likely to Die at Home
According to a new study, patients with terminal cancer that discharge from hospice care had significantly higher rates of hospitalizations – including admission to the emergency department and intensive care unit – than patients who remained under the care of hospice. Furthermore, patients who discharge from hospice were more likely to die in the hospital than patients who remained with hospice until their deaths. National Hospice and Palliative Care Organization hopes that healthcare professionals and policy makers will take time to look at this and other recent studies that help provide a better understanding of both the cost and quality-of-life benefits associated with the hospice experience, including honoring a patient’s wish to be…
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Research Shows Patients May Live Longer with Hospice and Palliative Care
(Alexandria, Va) – A new study released by the New England Journal of Medicine found that among patients with non-small-cell lung cancer, those who received palliative care lived, on average, almost two months longer than those who received standard care. Researchers also found that the patients receiving palliative care reported a higher quality of life through the final course of their illness.
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