nice article about ccrc's over on the new old age

[walkitout]

http://newoldage.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/11/06/ccrcs-the-bright-side/

Mysteriously, in comment number 4, a woman signing Karen Sadler asserts:

"With 4 in 10 of us projected to live to 120, new living options will continue to evolve so continue to check them out frequently and decide which is best for you."

Yeah, that can't be true, as a number of other commenters snuck up on.

The remaining question: is _anyone_ seriously asserting this, or is this a typo?

CCRC are "continuing care retirement communities". Generally speaking, you sell your house, use the proceeds to "buy in" to the community, and then depending on the setup, you pay some monthly cost which may be inflation adjusted but not change depending on which part of the community you are in (independent, assisted living or skilled nursing), or which may change depending on which part of the community you are in. For reasons that are complex, CCRC's have a limited constituency of cheerleaders, but it sounds like this may be beginning to change. In general, people have been attempting to make it to end of life in assisted living, which, honestly, Does Not Work past a certain point. CCRCs attempt to make the transition from assisted living to skilled nursing and/or unit-devoted-to-dementia-care less jarring, by having all the facilities on a campus, and by having the various parts of the facilities share some social/cafeteria/etc. stuff. CCRCs get slammed usually because they market the independent side, and the reality of the memory units creeps people out, and there is still a big wall between the levels in many CCRCs.

The comments thread is good, despite my drawing undue attention to the extremely wacky assertion in comment #4.

Comments

[ethelmay.livejournal.com]

That's the kind of place my mother-in-law was in. She had been in the dementia wing for a couple of months or so when she died. It was definitely a lot more expensive than the plain assisted living portion (she had pretty good long-term care insurance, though). I think B. said they saved something like $7K by moving her stuff out very quickly, before triggering another month's rent (I suppose insurance does not pay if the insured person is already dead).

I think she would have done much better there if she and her husband had moved there before his final illness -- he was always the one who took the lead in making new friends, and due to her shyness and deafness she really did not connect with anyone there, well before she had any mental problems. I also think the facility was going through a cycle where there were not many people who had a lot of energy -- different from how it had been when they'd first visited and made the decision to get on the list for the place.

Karen Sadler seems to be asserting that statistic all over ye webz. She says it's new research, but what do you bet it's the same thing reported here http://www.junkscience.com/oct99.html?

energy on first visit

[walkitout]

This is a typical complaint from people who move into a CCRC (or have a family member move into one) and was part of what I referred to when I said they marketed the active senior/independent and/or assisted living side and kinda hide the rest.

Maintaining friendships in a CCRC is also a huge known problem. Over and above the people-dying issue, when anyone moves rom one level of the facility to another, it turns out to require a tremendous commitment to maintain friendships past the transition, particularly after entering skilled nursing (never mind memory units). While in theory, things like eating areas are shared between levels, in practice, they often aren't.

I sure hope more of these things get addressed in the next thirty years. :l

Boy are you right about Karen Sadler! But if it's the millenium generation, she is _nuts_ to think that statistic could apply to her; she's a boomer, born in 1950! In any event, a quick look at the wikipedia entry for longest persons lived suggests that the number of people who have ever lived to 120 in any kind of verifiable way is _really short_. Like, one French woman.

Even more interesting is the wikipedia entry on "supercentenarian":

"A supercentenarian (sometimes hyphenated as super-centenarian) is someone who has reached the age of 110 years, something achieved by only one in a thousand centenarians (based on European data). Furthermore, 2% of supercentenarians lives to be 115."

It's really tough for me to imagine how this can be true in a world in which 1 in 4 of anyone currently alive now is going to make it to 120.

I sure feel for the offspring of anyone who lives that long. I've known enough people with long-lived parents and grandparents to recognize that hanging about for that long can make trouble for later generations. I cannot even imagine being around to see my kids in their 80s. Enough already.

Swift had it right

[ethelmay.livejournal.com]

Remember the Struldbrugs? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Struldbrug

Re: Swift had it right

[walkitout]

No!

Wow. That's actually kinda harsh.

Re: Swift had it right

[ethelmay.livejournal.com]

Swift is *always* harsh. I didn't mean that we should be cutting people's legal lives off at eighty, of course (my dad is 91, after all, and doing fine) -- only that immortality with the aging process intact would indeed be horrible. A healthy old age like my dad's is quite another thing, as far as one can reasonably sustain it.

Trends Neurosci. 2004 Oct;27(10):633-6.
Centenarians who avoid dementia.

Perls T.

New England Centenarian Study, Boston Medical Center, 88 East Newton Street, Boston, MA 02118, USA. thperls@bu.edu <thperls@bu.edu>

Some researchers and many in the lay public believe the ageist myth that the older you get the sicker you get. If this were true, it would follow that most if not all centenarians should have Alzheimer's disease. Numerous centenarian studies disprove this assumption given that a small percentage ( approximately 15-25%) of centenarians are functionally cognitively intact. Among those who are not cognitively intact at 100, approximately 90% delayed the onset of clinically evident impairment at least until an average age of 92 years. Neuropsychological and neuropathological correlations thus far suggest that there are centenarians who demonstrate no evidence of neurodegenerative disease. There also appear to be centenarians who, despite the substantial presence of neuropathological markers of Alzheimer's disease, do not meet clinical criteria for having dementia, thus suggesting the existence of cognitive reserve. Centenarians are therefore of scientific interest as a human model of relative resistance to dementia.
------------
Though all the same, if 75 to 85 percent of centenarians *do* have significant cognitive impairment, it doesn't seem all that ageist to me to assume it's a pretty likely outcome, making the notion of living to be a hundred less attractive than it otherwise might be. I actually think most people believe the opposite -- that if you get to 90 or so with very little cognitive impairment, you're likely home free and not going to have to worry about it, which doesn't seem to be the case. But most of us know at least one person who is well over ninety and as sharp as a tack (funny how people always use that phrase -- no one ever called my dad "sharp as a tack" when he was fifty, even though he was).

Re: Swift had it right

[walkitout]

That's a terribly written abstract. I wonder how they got away with it? Certainly one could get sicker as one got older and _still_ be cognitively intact! Bizarre.

I'm not getting anywhere on "sharp as a tack" other than that it appears to have shown up in 1912 as a variant on "sharp as a needle". My folk etymology subroutine is tempted to invoke "slang for people who grew up with that slang", but folk etymology is never right anyway.