Study finds living alone puts people with cognitive decline at risk

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An estimated one in four older Americans with dementia or mild cognitive impairment lives alone and is at risk of practices like unsafe driving, wandering outside the home, mixing up medications and failing to attend medical appointments.

The providers raised concerns about patients missing medical appointments, failing to respond to follow-up phone calls from the doctor's office and forgetting why appointments were made, leaving them vulnerable to falling off the radar."We don't necessarily have the staff to really try to reach out to them," said a physician in one interview.

These patients were at risk for untreated medical conditions, self-neglect, malnutrition and falls, according to the providers. A house service coordinator also noted that calls to Adult Protective Services were sometimes dismissed until a patient's situation became very serious. These findings are an indictment of our health care system, which fails to provide subsidized home care aides for all but the lowest-income patients, said Portacolone.have an income that is not low enough to make them eligible for Medicaid subsidized home care aides in long-term care," she said, adding that the threshold for a person living alone in California is $20,121 per year.

 

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