(Press-News.org) The 2015 White House Conference on Aging (WHCoA), slated for July 13 in Washington, DC, is focused on four priority areas: retirement security, healthy aging, long-term services and supports, and elder justice. In response, The Gerontological Society of America has produced a special issue of Public Policy & Aging Report (Volume 25, Number 2), wherein the nation's foremost experts on these topics make policy recommendations to improve the lives of all Americans as they age. The publication was supported by AARP.
The WHCoA has been held once every decade since the 1960s and offers a unique opportunity to shape the national landscape for aging-related policies. Writing in the new issue's opening editorial, PP&AR editor Robert B. Hudson, PhD, said that the rights, roles, and needs of older Americans will hold center stage at this year's event.
"It is important that such deliberations take place because the demographics and economics of aging continue to shift in important ways," Hudson stated. "Long gone -- thanks largely to public policy -- are days when elders were singularly poor and frail. Yet, a new series of pressures associated with extended lives, income differentials, and living environments will mark aging in the years ahead."
Multiple policy proposals for each of the WHCoA's four topics are included. For elder justice, they include calls for a public awareness campaign, elder mistreatment education, the creation of an elder abuse prevention database, and mobilizing advocates toward empowering older people around the prevalence and danger of elder abuse.
On the subject of long-term services and supports, the authors advocate increasing services availability, providing enhanced caregiver support and training, improving technology-enabled care, expanding efforts to measure both services quality and client outcomes , addressing the needs of the direct-care workforce, and devising a public-private solution to the endemic financing problems impeding the delivery of needed care.
With regard to retirement security, the experts say that eligibility periods for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) should be extended, and Social Security Administration and Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services data should be used to alert elders to their SNAP eligibility. Others argue that Social Security should be strengthened and benefits increased.
To promote healthy aging, the articles cover several initiatives. One proposes that Americans adopt major changes in lifestyle and a focus on prevention, while embracing technological advances, workplace redesign and, more broadly, a paradigm shift stressing both individual responsibility and population-wide strategies. Another piece demonstrates the value of age-friendly communities, which have been shown to address the problems of isolation, economic insecurity, and lack of mobility.
The latest issue of PP&AR is part of a larger effort GSA is undertaking to help ensure the 2015 WHCoA is a success. On June 25, GSA will host a webinar titled "New Visions for Long-Term Services and Supports: The Aging Network & the White House Conference on Aging," with WHCoA Executive Director Nora Super, MPA, among the speakers. She previously participated in a WHCoA listening session at GSA's most recent Annual Scientific Meeting in Washington, DC.
GSA also is a founding member of the Leadership Council of Aging Organizations, which together with AARP held a series of five WHCoA regional forums designed to gain input on the key issues from older Americans, their families, caregivers, and authorities in the field of aging. In April, another GSA journal, The Gerontologist, dedicated an issue (Volume 55, Number 2) to the four themed topics of the WHCoA.
"GSA always has had a special relationship with the WHCoA," said GSA's director of public policy, Greg O'Neill, PhD. "I view the articles in this issue of PP&AR as continuing our long tradition of providing the WHCoA with thought leadership that supports our common missions to develop effective policies that will benefit our aging society in the years ahead."
INFORMATION:
Public Policy & Aging Report is a publication of the National Academy on an Aging Society, the policy branch of The Gerontological Society of America (GSA). As the nation's oldest and largest interdisciplinary organization devoted to research, education, and practice in the field of aging, GSA's principal mission -- and that of its 5,500+ members -- is to advance the study of aging and disseminate information among scientists, decision makers, and the general public. GSA's structure also includes an educational branch, the Association for Gerontology in Higher Education.
Physicists at UC San Diego have developed a new way to control the transport of electrical currents through high-temperature superconductors -- materials discovered nearly 30 years ago that lose all resistance to electricity at commercially attainable low temperatures.
Their development, detailed in two separate scientific publications, paves the way for the development of sophisticated electronic devices capable of allowing scientists or clinicians to non-invasively measure the tiny magnetic fields in the heart or brain, and improve satellite communications.
'We believe ...
New estimates suggest that more than two-thirds of Americans are either overweight or obese, according to an article published online by JAMA Internal Medicine.
Overweight and obesity are associated with a variety of chronic health conditions, which could potentially be avoided by preventing weight gain and obesity.
Graham A. Colditz, M.D., Dr.P.H., and Lin Yang, Ph.D., of the Washington University School of Medicine, St. Louis, analyzed data from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey from 2007 to 2012 to estimate the prevalence of overweight and obesity. ...
The median percentage of children and adolescents who reported being bullied online was 23 percent and there appears to be a consistent relationship between cyberbullying and reports of depression in a review of social media studies, according to an article published online by JAMA Pediatrics.
Social media is a presence in the lives of young people, with reports indicating 95 percent of American teenagers use the Internet and that 81 percent of them use social media. But these online interactions can coincide with potential risks and safety concerns regarding social media, ...
The current monitoring of patients with cardiac implantable electronic devices (CIEDs) such as pacemakers and defibrillators may be underestimating device problems, according to UC San Francisco researchers who propose systematic methods to determine accurate causes of sudden death in those with CIEDs as well as improved monitoring for device concerns.
Their study appears online June 22 in JAMA Internal Medicine.
"With a vast majority of out-of-hospital sudden deaths evaluated by medical examiners or coroners, CIED problems are often missed in the postmortem investigation, ...
Researchers from the University of Cambridge and the Babraham Institute have found that a naturally occurring modified DNA base appears to be stably incorporated in the DNA of many mammalian tissues, possibly representing an expansion of the functional DNA alphabet.
The new study, published today (22 June) in the journal Nature Chemical Biology, has found that this rare 'extra' base, known as 5-formylcytosine (5fC) is stable in living mouse tissues. While its exact function is yet to be determined, 5fC's physical position in the genome makes it likely that it plays a ...
Researchers from the University of Cambridge, together with French collaborators based in Toulouse, have developed a new method to see inside battery-like devices known as supercapacitors at the atomic level. The new method could be used in order to optimise and improve the devices for real-world applications, including electric cars, where they can be used alongside batteries to enhance a vehicle's performance.
By using a combination of nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy and tiny scales sensitive enough to detect changes in mass of a millionth of a gram, ...
More than half of long-term smokers and ex-smokers who are considered disease-free because they passed lung-function tests have respiratory-related impairments when more closely evaluated with lung imaging, walking and quality-of-life tests. Many of those people likely have the earliest stages of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, an incurable progressive disease (COPD) that is the third leading cause of death in the United States.
"The impact of chronic smoking on the lungs and the individual is substantially underestimated when using lung-function tests alone," ...
A gene previously suspected of wielding the single greatest genetic influence on human obesity actually has nothing to do with body weight, according to a new study led by researchers at Harvard Medical School and Boston Children's Hospital.
The work not only overturns a major finding about the genetics of obesity but also provides the first effective ways to analyze "particularly ornery and confusing" parts of the genome, such as the locus of this gene, said the study's co-senior author, Steven McCarroll, assistant professor of genetics at HMS.
The techniques described ...
In 2002, archaeologists discovered the jawbone of a human who lived in Europe about 40,000 years ago. Geneticists have now analyzed ancient DNA from that jawbone and learned that it belonged to a modern human whose recent ancestors included Neanderthals.
Neanderthals lived in Europe until about 35,000 years ago, disappearing at the same time modern humans were spreading across the continent. The new study, co-led by Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) investigator David Reich at Harvard Medical School and Svante Pääbo at the Max Planck Institute in Germany, ...
The island Isla Santa María in the south of central Chile is the document of a complete seismic cycle.
Charles Darwin and his captain Robert Fitzroy witnessed the great earthquake of 1835 in south central Chile. The „Beagle"-Captain's precise measurements showed an uplift of the island Isla Santa María of 2 to 3 meters after the earthquake. What Darwin and Fitzroy couldn't know was the fact that 175 years later nearly at the same position such a strong earthquake would recur.
At the South American west coastline the Pacific Ocean floor moves under the ...
