From the Orlando Sentinel:

The sheriff’s office in Polk County has launched “Project Safe & Sound,” in which people with special needs are assigned a bracelet with a phone number for the sheriff’s office, a request to call for help and an identification number.

Officials say the program is designed to help children and adults with special needs get home safely.

The program was spearheaded by Crystle Feran, whose daughter has Down syndrome. (more…)

From the [UK] Telegraph, [UK] Guardian:

The Alzheimer Society in Britain is proposing an initiative that could lead to satellite tracking of tens of thousands of people in the early stages of the degenerative disease. A national debate is anticipated.

The charity said about 700,000 people in Britain had some form of dementia and up to 60 percent occasionally felt compelled to walk away from home without knowing how or where to return. This exposed them to danger and caused anxiety among relatives and carers.

(more…)

From the St. Paul Pioneer Press:

Early-stage Alzheimer’s disease patients and their caregivers get a new kind of support

Hectic holidays often expose symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease

In the Los Angeles Times, projections that Alzheimer’s disease will ravage the economy.

By 2010, Alzheimer’s care will cost Medicare about $160 billion a year. By 2035, it could overtake the defense budget. One analysis has estimated that by 2050, Alzheimer’s will cost Medicare more than $1 trillion annually. Those numbers do not include privately insured and uninsured costs.

“From a social and economic view, it is about the money, the growing diversion of resources to sustain life in those increasingly unaware of their own lives,” Harry Tracy wrote recently in NeuroInvestment, his industry newsletter. “There is no greater public health issue looming in the developed world.”

(more…)

From the New York Times, a package of articles about Alzheimer’s disease. Scientists now think it begins long before symptoms are apparent.

“Alzheimer’s disease may be a chronic condition in which changes begin in midlife or even earlier,” said Dr. John C. Morris, director of the Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center at Washington University in St. Louis, where Ms. Kerley volunteers for studies.

But currently, the diagnosis is not made until symptoms develop, and by then it may already be too late to rescue the brain. Drugs now in use temporarily ease symptoms for some, but cannot halt the underlying disease.

(more…)

From Vanity Fair: The essays in “An Uncertain Inheritance: Writers on Care for Family” (William Morrow, 304 pages, $24.95), edited by Nell Casey with a foreword by Frank McCourt, are

“revelatory glimpses into the everyday agonies and occasional flashes of rapture caregivers experience.”

Melanie Lauwers, writing in the Cape Cod Times, says this collection of short stories and essays

… may help comfort you or inform you or simply let you see some aspect of your own life and be able to remark, “That’s so true.”

(more…)

From the New York Times, a thoughtful analysis of the relationship between former Justice Sandra Day O’Connor and her husband John, who has Alzheimer’s disease. The O’Connor family reported this week that Mr. O’Connor has a relationship with a woman whom he met in an assisted-living center, and his wife is happy that he is happy.

Writer Kate Zernike points out that the O’Connors’ story of what she calls “old love” comes as a surprise in a society that is more concerned with the breathless rapture of “young love.”

The O’Connors’ story, she says, “revealed a poignancy and a richness to love in the later years, providing a rare model at a time when people are living longer, and loving longer.

… “There’s a difference between love as it is presented in movies and music as this jazzy sexy thing that involves bikini underwear and what love actually turns out to be,” said the psychologist Mary Pipher, whose book “Another Country” looked at the emotional life of the elderly.

… “Young love is about wanting to be happy,” she said. “Old love is about wanting someone else to be happy.”