An article co-authored by Susan L. Mitchell, M.D., M.P.H., of Hebrew SeniorLife’s Institute for Aging Research reports that nursing home residents with advanced dementia are frequently prescribed antibiotic medications, especially during the two weeks before death.

Conventional wisdom holds that as the U.S. population ages, the incidence of heart failure will continue to rise. A new study from Duke University Medical Center challenges part of that assumption, however, finding that heart failure is actually declining among the very elderly.

The number of elderly individuals newly diagnosed with heart failure has declined during the past ten years, but the number of those living with the condition has increased, according to a report in the February 25 issue of Archives of Internal Medicine, one of the JAMA/Archives journals.

Older Americans with the highest risk of stroke, but those who have never suffered a stroke, also have the highest rate of cognitive decline, researchers reported at the American Stroke Association’s International Stroke Conference 2008.

Group Health seniors are not only sweating to the oldies in local health clubs. They are also keeping health care costs down, according to a study by researchers at Group Health and the University of Washington (UW). The study appears in the January 2008 issue of the journal Preventing Chronic Disease.

More elderly adults are lighting up cigarettes and not reporting their nicotine habits to doctors and others, according to findings from one of the first studies to examine the accuracy of self-reported smoking habits by age, race and gender of adults 18 years and older by researchers at the Case Western Reserve University School of Dental Medicine and other university collaborators.

A team approach to treating depression in older adults, already shown to improve health, can also cut total health-care costs, according to a new study led by the University of Washington. The study appears in the February issue of the American Journal of Managed Care.

Older women are more prone to depression and are more likely to remain depressed than older men, according to a new study by Yale School of Medicine researchers in the February Archives of General Psychiatry.

The annual number of Americans older than 65 newly diagnosed with diabetes increased by 23 percent between 1994 to 1995 and 2003 to 2004, according to a report in the January 28 issue of Archives of Internal Medicine, one of the JAMA/Archives journals.

The variation in human platelets in the elderly population is not significantly large, report researchers in a study that has strong implications for clinical biomarker research.

Researchers at Yale School of Medicine have found that a low concentration of vitamin E in the blood is linked with physical decline in older persons.

Selectively restraining elderly residents and giving them fewer sleeping pills could significantly reduce falls, according to a survey of 21 nursing home units published in the January issue of Journal of Clinical Nursing.