Deck 14: The Personal Context of Later Life: Physical, Cognitive, and Mental Health Issues

Question 1

If a friend asked you the difference between dementia and the normative increases in forgetting that occur with age, what would you tell him or her?

Answer 1

Several changes accompany aging which include loss of memory. Memory loss in old age can either be as a normal aging process or as a symptom of neurological conditions such as dementia. The difference between these two is that neurological disorder linked memory loss will be accompanied by other symptoms such as neuromotor coordination, etc.

Question 2

If you were to design an intervention program to maximize the odds that people will live to maximum longevity, what would you emphasize?

Answer 2

Longevity is defined as the maximum number of years that an individual can live and there is an increasing trend of better longevity in the recent years. This trend is largely due to the advancements in health-care and also in a better awareness among people towards a healthy life style.
Intervention programs that can help people to maximize longevity should ideally include the following:
• An emphasis on healthy lifestyle
• Awareness on age-related changes
• Awareness on the steps required to slow down the aging process

Question 3

After reading about the symptoms of Alzheimer's disease, what do you think would be the most stressful aspects of caring for a parent who has the disease? (You may want to refer to the section on caring for aging parents in Chapter.)

Answer 3

Alzheimer's disease is one of the neurodegeneratory diseases that occur in old age. This is a serious condition and health care providers for people affected with Alzeimer's should be well trained.
Some of the aspects that increase stress while caring for such patients will be the confusion and lack of attention of the subjects. Also, the impairment of proper communication mode makes it difficult to gauge the requirements of such people. Individuals with Alzheimer's loose the ability for personal self-care and hence, to maintain them in aphysically health shape will be stressful for caretakers.

Question 4

Think back to the lifestyle influences on health discussed in Chapter 12. If most people actually exhibited a healthy lifestyle, what do you think would happen to average life expectancy?

Question 5

Compared to younger adults, older adults are less likely to label their feelings of sadness as ____.

Question 6

The fastest growing segment of the population in the United States is people over age ____.

Question 7

A form of psychotherapy that focuses on people's beliefs about the self, the world, and the future is called ____.

Question 8

The age at which half of the people born in a particular year will have died is called ____.

Question 9

Relaxation techniques are an effective therapy for ____.

Question 10

The Fourth Age refers to the ____ old.

Question 11

The only way to definitively diagnose Alzheimer's disease is through a ____.

Question 12

How do the sensory changes that occur with age affect an older adult's everyday life?

Question 13

Twisted fibers called ____ occur in the axon of neurons in persons with Alzheimer's disease.

Question 14

In this section we have concentrated on the biological forces in development. Think about the other forces (psychological, social, and life-cycle), and list some reasons why scientists have yet to propose a purely biological theory that accounts for all aspects of aging.

Question 15

Two major groups of biological theories of aging are ____ theories and damage or error theories.

Question 16

Damaged and dying neurons that collect around a core of protein produce ____.

Question 17

The risk of getting cancer ____ markedly with age.

Question 18

If you were to design a training program for older drivers, what elements would you include?

Question 19

How would the view that wisdom involves life experience fit into the discussion of expertise in Chapter?

Question 20

One universal factor regarding information processing and aging is the slowing of ____.

Question 21

The two types of explicit memory are and ____.

Question 22

Three factors that help a person become wise are general personal conditions, special expertise conditions, and ____.