A new diagnosis of Alzheimer’s or other dementia often spurs a person to move from their home, new research shows. “One possible explanation is that individuals with dementia and their caregivers may choose to move closer to family or informal caregivers, either with independent housing arrangements or entering formal long-term care services,” wrote a team led by Momotazur Rahman, an associate professor of health services, policy and practice at Brown University in Providence, R.I. The study was published Oct. 14 in the journal JAMA Network Open. The researchers used Medicare data on the residential histories of over 1.6 million Medicare beneficiaries. All had received a diagnosis of either dementia, heart attack, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) or colon cancer in 2016.  Each person’s domicile (including nursing homes) was tracked over the eight years before and after the 2016 diagnosis — 2012 through 2020. In the four years before a dementia diagnosis, there was no difference observed in where people lived or whether they relocated, the study found. However, within the four years of a dementia diagnosis, 22% of people moved to a different U.S. county, Rahman’s group found. That’s a 40% jump in relocations compared to folks who’d been diagnosed with other conditions, such as heart attack or COPD. People with a dementia diagnosis were also more likely to move to another state, the study…  read on >  read on >

Doctors might be overprescribing sedatives to stroke survivors, a new study warns. About 5% of people are prescribed a benzodiazepine following a stroke, to help calm anxiety and improve sleep, researchers found. Benzodiazepine meds include Valium, Ativan and Xanax. But these prescriptions often are for pills that last longer than a week, which could hamper a person’s recovery and increase their risk of addiction. “We found a pattern of potential oversupply with these initial benzodiazepine prescriptions, which would be enough for patients to become long-term users or possibly addicted,” said researcher Julianne Brooks, a data analytics manager at Massachusetts General Brigham in Boston. “The benzodiazepine prescriptions given under these circumstances may lead to dependence.” For the study, researchers analyzed a decade’s worth of Medicare claims data on first-time prescriptions for benzodiazepines among more than 120,000 stroke victims aged 65 and older. “For this older age group, guidelines recommend that benzodiazepine prescriptions should be avoided if possible,” Brooks said. These sedatives increase the risk of falls, broken bones, memory problems, confusion and other harmful effects, the researchers said. “However, there may be cases where benzodiazepines are prescribed to be used as needed,” Brooks noted. “For example, to treat breakthrough anxiety, a provider may prescribe a few pills and counsel the patient that the medication should only be used as needed.” Researchers found that about 5% of…  read on >  read on >

A young Israeli researcher who lost a sibling in the Oct. 7, 2023 Hamas attack on Israeli civilians said the tragedy has spurred her to study the unique aspects of grief at the sudden loss of a brother or sister. The research by Master of Arts student Masada Buchris, of Hebrew University in Jerusalem, hasn’t yet been published in a peer-reviewed journal and will become part of her thesis. But it’s already showing that grief over lost siblings differs from grief felt by the loss of a parent, partner or child. “This research is deeply personal for me,” Buchris said in a university news release. “Losing my sibling on October 7th was a life-altering event, and it became clear that many bereaved siblings face ‘unrecognized grief.’ This study is the first step towards understanding the profound consequences of such a loss and ensuring that siblings receive the support they need.” Buchris’ work focused on 444 people who lost a sibling in the Oct. 7 attacks, which killed over 1,200 people, according to the U.S. Department of State. The bereaved siblings averaged about 32 years of age, and just over two-thirds interviewed were women. Buchris said she used various standard psychological measurements to gauge each person’s “emotional distress, negative thoughts and coping mechanisms.” Her study so far has discovered that grief at the loss of a…  read on >  read on >

Obesity is a more powerful driver of breast cancer than previously thought, a new study suggests. About 40% of hormone-positive breast cancers in postmenopausal women might be linked to excess body fat, researchers reported Oct. 15 in the Journal of Epidemiology & Community Health. That’s significantly more than previous estimates that linked excess weight to 1 in 10 breast cancer cases, based on measures of women’s body-mass index (BMI), researchers said. The real-world impact of obesity on breast cancer risk likely has been underestimated because BMI isn’t a very accurate measure of body fat, the researchers argued. “The findings of this study highlight the importance of considering more accurate measures of body fat than BMI to estimate the cancer burden attributable to obesity in postmenopausal breast cancer,” concluded the research team led by Veronica Davila-Batista, an associate professor of epidemiology with the University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria in Spain. For this study, researchers compared BMI with a different measure of body fat called the CUN-BAE, an equation which accounts for gender and age in BMI measurements. The two measures were used to weigh 1,022 older Spanish women with breast cancer and another 1,143 matched women who didn’t have cancer. About 23% of breast cancer cases were linked to excess body weight as measured by BMI, researchers found. However, about 38% of breast cancers…  read on >  read on >