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Maintaining their own health: Support group offers rest for dementia caregivers
Caregiving is hard, and caregivers need support to continue in this demanding role for days, months and even years.
Your employees have caregiving responsibilities. Is your small business prepared?
Rocket Lawyer reports that small businesses must prepare for employees with caregiving responsibilities by establishing clear policies to avoid confusion and legal issues.
Humpback whale mother may have mourned her dead calf for days
Researchers observed a humpback whale mother staying beside her presumed stillborn calf for hours and possibly days off Australia’s Gold Coast. She maintained eye contact and remained close to the calf in behavior resembling caregiving and nurturing. Scientists say the rare observation may provide new insight into grief, maternal attachment, and emotional complexity in humpback whales.
Is 50 the new 60?
Subscribe TL;DR: Younger generations are showing signs of worse health compared to earlier-born cohorts at the same age This backward “drift” is showing up both in mortality risk and chronic disease Worsening trends in obesity and diabetes are the most consistent signals Taking the long view, we’ve made astonishing gains in health and life expectancy in the last century. Global average life expectancy has more than doubled from 32 years in 1900 to 73 years in 2024. (But don’t forget, there were still old people when life expectancy was 32). As people lived longer, they also generally lived healthier along the way. It turns out that avoiding things that can kill you early, like malnutrition and lots of childhood infections, also keeps you healthier later in life. In a classic 2004 paper, Finch and Crimmins proposed that cohorts of children who benefited from fewer early life infections had less lifetime exposure to inflammation and cardiovascular disease later in life, accelerating mortality improvements at older ages. Poor nutrition in the womb has also been linked to a higher risk of later chronic disease. The upshot is that improvements in childhood health can pay dividends many decades later. The combination of better living conditions (nutrition, sanitation) and medical advances (antibiotics, vaccines, blood pressure meds, etc) meant that people’s healthy lifespan generally expanded, even as they lived longer. Aging researchers call this best-case scenario “compression of morbidity”—meaning we delay the onset of disease and disability even faster than the years of life we are adding. During my 20+ year research career, we could generally bank on the idea that younger generations would not only live longer but also keep getting healthier along the way. “60 is the new 50” as they say… Enter “Generational Health Drift” Sadly, this expectation of steady progress may be changing. You’ve probably heard that US life expectancy gains have slowed to a crawl in the past couple of decades. Mortality improvements are also slowing (though less dramatically) in many other high-income countries (you can read more about that in a review paper I wrote here). Mortality is a very blunt health measure, but it is often a good barometer for the broader population health trends happening underneath. And we are now seeing that younger generations may be in worse health at similar ages compared to earlier born cohorts. My collaborator Prof. George Ploubidis at University College London coined this worsening health in more recently born cohorts “generational health drift.” “Generational health drift” is bad news on multiple fronts. Most obviously, we don’t want our health progress to go backward. But the timing is also bad, since our populations are aging. In demographic terms, “population aging” means that the proportion of the population at older ages (i.e >65 years) is increasing. Fun demography fact: Current population aging is not due to the recent declines in the birth rates making the news, but declines in fertility decades ago, after the “baby boom.” As baby boomers reach older ages, the smaller cohorts behind them mean the percentage of older adults will increase. For example, the share of the population age 65 and older in the US increased from 12.4% in 2004 to 18.0% in 2024. This story of population aging was written long ago. Many worry that population aging will put pressure on health care and pension systems. But if people reach older ages in better health than in years past, those fiscal pressures would be less dire than projected. Healthy older people can also continue to contribute to society in many valuable ways, including paid work, caregiving, community service….even high political office 🤷. On the flip side, if younger generations reach retirement age in worse health and with more disabling conditions, this could magnify the societal challenge of population aging. Evidence for worsening generational health A recent paper that I LOVED in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences by Dr. Leah Abrams and colleagues examined which birth cohorts (aka generations) were behind worsening US mortality. Behold the Lexis diagram (cue swooning demographers). Calendar time is on the x-axis, age on the y-axis. Birth cohorts can be followed over time as they age on the diagonal lines moving up and to the right. This figure plots the year-on-year % change in all-cause mortality at a given age. Green shading indicates mortality improvements over time, white is stagnation, and gray shading indicates worsening mortality. Following the diagonal line for those born in 1950, you can see a noticeable shift from green to gray that follows this cohort for most of their lives. This gray shading shows generally worsening mortality for the 1950 to 1959 birth cohorts compared to their predecessors across all ages. Concerningly for my GenX and elder millennial peeps, there was also a deterioration in mortality for birth cohorts born in the 1970s and 1980s, visible as dark gray areas at ages 30 to 45 during the 2010s. While some of these mortality changes reflect specific shocks such as the opioid epidemic, most deaths still occur from major causes of death such as cardiovascular disease and cancer. For cancer, the gray in the top left corner of the figure below reflects the legacies of smoking for older cohorts, followed by a period of green with improvements in cancer mortality as smoking rates declined. But the white/gray shading in the bottom right corner highlights a stagnation and reversal of the cancer trends, with cohorts born around 1970 to 1985 experiencing worsening cancer mortality. This deterioration was most noticeable for colon cancer mortality, possibly linked to obesity or dietary factors. Not just dying more, but less healthy along the way. A recent paper by Dr. Laura Gimeno of University College London (of which I am a co-author), found evidence that more recently born cohorts in Great Britain have stagnating or worsening health. A stylized picture of what“generational health drift” might look like: The review paper found: Rates of childhood overweight and obesity were highest among Gen Z. Rates of diabetes in the 40s almost doubled from 3.1% among the Baby Boomers to 5.9% in Generation X. Gen Z reported higher rates of poor mental health in adolescence compared to earlier-born groups. These UK results are consistent with studies showing worsening health across generations in the US as well. A 2021 US study found that more recently born cohorts had worse biological markers (like blood pressure and blood sugar) than earlier generations at the same age. A separate 2022 study of Americans aged 50 and over found that more recently born generations had a higher number of chronic diseases, with younger age of disease onset. A 2024 Lancet paper found that in the US, women born in 1945 had 33% obesity prevalence at age 50, rising to 48.2% for women born in 1970 turning 50. So what’s going on, and can we turn it around? We don’t have a definitive answer for what’s causing the deteriorating health of younger cohorts, but circumstantial evidence points to worsening trends in obesity and diabetes in both the US and UK. Remember that cohort trends reflect lagged effects of early environments, and younger generations have faced both earlier onset and more severe obesity across their lifetimes. Despite these very concerning trends, the future is not set in stone. We’ve reversed poor generational health trends before: drops in smoking are a major reason cancer and heart disease deaths fell so dramatically in recent decades. GLP-1 drugs may finally turn the tide against rising rates of obesity and diabetes, though it is still early days. But things could also get worse…for example from a return to higher levels of childhood infectious diseases that can have a lasting impact on health. See for example: [ ](https://jenndowd.substack.com/p/dont-you-forget-about-measles-the) [ Don’t You Forget About Me(asles): The Virus That Erases Immune Memory ](https://jenndowd.substack.com/p/dont-you-forget-about-measles-the) Jenn Dowd, PhD · March 24, 2025 [ Read full story ](https://jenndowd.substack.com/p/dont-you-forget-about-measles-the) Even as an optimist, emerging data on the “generational health drift” has my full attention. For most of my research career, we took it for granted that each generation would be healthier than the last. But if present trends continue, **50 could be the new 60….**and Gen Z celebrities will soon look older than Paul Rudd :). Stay well, Jenn Share the Health! If you found this post useful, please share it with a friend. Share
More grandparents are delaying retirement to help kids and grandkids
Joann Ernst, 72, supports her family financially, delaying retirement to care for her grandchildren, amid rising senior caregiving trends.
Thousands seek support at Duke caregiver event as NC population ages
The Duke Health Caregiver Community Event helps connect caregivers to resources near them as the need for caregivers grows statewide. Attendees can speak with trained professionals to receive guidance on how to best navigate the many challenges that come with caregiving.
Lane County caregiving business becomes employee-owned
Lane County caregiving business Rise & Shine Social Enterprise has become Oregon's first employee-owned business of its kind, aiming to reduce staff turnover and support community care.
Eastlake science students make district history
Three Eastlake High School students made Sweetwater Union High School District history this year when they became the first students from the district to qualify for the International Science and Engineering Fair, an international competition that brings together some of the top high school researchers from around the world. Ronald Wyatt, Giles Del Priore and Ihan Sung advanced to the competition after successful runs at regional and state science fairs. Sung went a step further, placing fourth in the chemistry category at ISEF. The students were recognized on Aug. 10 during a Sweetwater Union High School District board meeting at the district office in Chula Vista.For Wyatt and Del Priore, recent Eastlake graduates, the journey began with a shared concern about dementia and the challenges faced by families caring for loved ones with memory impairment. Their engineering project, “Design and Evaluation of a Behaviorally Grounded Caregiver-Governed AI Companion for Individuals with Memory Impairment,” earned the Sweepstakes Award at the Sweetwater District STEM Fair and first place in its division at the Greater San Diego Science and Engineering Fair. The project explored whether Artificial Intelligence could provide companionship and support while helping reduce stress for people with dementia and their caregivers. “Our inspiration came from personal experience. Both of us have seen family members and loved ones affected by dementia, and we’ve witnessed how overwhelming the caregiving process can be,” Wyatt said. Del Priore said the students also wanted to address the high cost of third-party health care services while creating something that could potentially help their own families as well as people elsewhere. The students developed an AI system designed with safeguards intended to prevent misinformation reinforcement, emotional escalation and unsafe responses. In 240 controlled trials involving memory, identity, agitation and neutral scenarios, they said the system consistently prevented harmful incorrect reinforcement while using context-aware silence, de-escalation and caregiver verification. The project required the students to combine Artificial Intelligence, psychology, neuroscience and human-computer interaction. For Del Priore, one of the biggest technical challenges was getting the AI companion to communicate verbally with a patient. Hardware limitations required the students to collaborate with multiple Python libraries for speech-to-text and text-to-speech functions while keeping the cost of the companion low. “For us, the biggest challenge was translating complex behavioral and cognitive care principles into a functioning AI system,” Wyatt said.Qualifying for ISEF was a milestone that student expected. The international competition proved to be another milestone. “Competing at ISEF was an incredible experience and unlike anything we’ve ever done before,” Del Priore said. “Being surrounded by some of the most talented young researchers from around the world was both inspiring and motivating.” He said the experience stood out because of the emphasis on collaboration, innovation and scientific discovery. “The most memorable part was seeing how people from completely different backgrounds and disciplines approached solving real-world problems with creativity and passion,” he said. The students also credited teachers and mentors who supported their work. Del Priore said his sophomore-year AP Physics teacher, Dr. Price, was particularly influential. “Through all of my personal and academic struggles, Dr. Price always believed in me,” Del Priore said. “All of his faith in me really molded me into the person I am today and helped create my love for science even through tough times.” Wyatt is continuing his education at UC Santa Cruz, where he plans to study biomolecular engineering and bioinformatics, with an interest in research involving Artificial Intelligence, biology and health care. Del Priore plans to double major in chemistry and accounting. Sung, a rising Eastlake senior, qualified for ISEF after winning first place in the Engineering: Energy, Materials & Transport category at the Greater San Diego Science and Engineering Fair and first place in chemistry at the California Science and Engineering Fair. His project, “Renewable Ammonia Electrochemical Synthesis by Glow Discharge with an Iron-Based Catalyst,” involved a device he designed and engineered to produce renewable ammonia, with potential applications in fertilizer production and energy storage. Sung became interested in the project after considering the relationship between food insecurity and fertilizer costs. His system uses plasma to break apart nitrogen molecules so they can interact with hydrogen and form ammonia. At ISEF, Sung competed against more than 1,700 students from 65 countries and earned fourth place in chemistry. “I am proud to become one of te first students in the district to qualify for ISEF because this milestone can inspire others in the district to attain similar goals,” Sung said.
First person-centered measure of dementia caregiving styles improves partner, patient outcomes
First person-centered measure of dementia caregiving styles improves partner and patient outcomes.
8 healthcare-specific jobs growing in popularity as work-from-home options
Some of the most in-demand healthcare jobs can be performed from home despite requiring direct caregiving skills.
My mom has Alzheimer's. Caregiving never really stops.
I thought arranging 24-hour care for my mom with Alzheimer's would ease the burden. Instead, I discovered how much caregiving remained.
I went back to work to afford my husband's caregiving costs
Brenda Eicher-Beard quit working once her husband had a stroke, but had to go back a few years later to afford private caregiving of about $5,000.
Families using tech to help seniors age at home, ease caregiving bills
Families are experimenting with technology like cameras and robots in hopes of swapping $10,000-a-month assisted living bills for $100 subscriptions.
Success via SNF mental health assistants: How one provider slashed antipsychotics use, bad behavior and hospitalizations
One of the nation’s largest nursing homes is expanding its behavioral health initiatives, offering important insights for caregiving as providers nationwide admit more patients than ever with serious mental illness or other complex diagnoses.
Advancing Brain Health & Caregiving with Healthy Aging Practices
Learn how to advance brain health and caregiving through healthy aging practices and policies, including paid family leave, healthy community design, and more.
Emma Heming Willis Opens Up About Caregiving and Brain Health: ‘Ask for Help’
The mom of two shares how she prioritizes her own health and needs as a caregiver to husband Bruce Willis as he battles frontotemporal dementia.
Emma Heming Willis on Bruce Willis, Brain Health, Caregiving
Emma Heming Willis, co-creator and chief impact officer of Make Time Wellness and caregiver to her husband Bruce Willis, joins TODAY with her brand’s scientific advisor, Nicole Beurkens, to share an update on Bruce and opens up about how her struggle with brain fog inspired her to educate women on prioritizing their brain health.
Moving my dad into a nursing home improved both our lives
After years of caregiving stress, moving my father into long-term care restored his dignity and gave our family relief.
What's in it for you?
Caregiving is complex work. It requires technical skill, emotional regulation, patience, adaptability, trust and presence.
I couldn't afford elder care for my mom. Free adult day care helped.
Natalie Tucker says her mother's falls and memory loss made caregiving overwhelming until she found a Medicaid-supported adult day care program.
Moving close to my mom has made caregiving and parenting easier.
We purposely moved to the same neighborhood my mom lives in. It's made parenting and caregiving a lot easier on all of us.
I went to the largest aging conference: AI and age tech sparked debate
At the largest US conference on aging, AI, technology, the looming caregiving crisis, and Social Security dominated discussions about growing older.
African American Health Symposium highlights support for those impacted by Alzheimer's
This year's theme: "It Takes a Village: Faith, Family and Community in Caregiving."
Village Caregiving Lewisburg recognized as “New Business of the Year” for 2025
LEWISBURG, WV (WVNS) – Village Caregiving Lewisburg was awarded “New Business of the Year” by the Greater Greenbrier Chamber of Commerce for 2025. Village Caregiving serves all 55 counties in West Vir...
AARP report: Florida unpaid family caregiving climbs to $81 billion annually
'This care often comes at significant cost to caregivers’ health, financial security, and well-being.'
The political world of caregiving
Writer and scholar Laura Mauldin's new book takes on the hidden politics of spousal care.
Paid Leave at a Crossroads: Business Leadership, Caregiving, and the Power of Story | National Partnership for Women & Families
Every day, working people across the country wake up already making tradeoffs. They plan their commutes around childcare drop-offs, take calls from doctors' offices during lunch breaks, and quietly calculate how many sick days they have left if something goes wrong. For millions of caregivers, work and care are not separate parts of life — they are deeply intertwined, often in ways that leave little margin for error.
The anti-ICE movement isn't just about politics — it's a caregiving social movement
It’s a caregiving social movement based on relatedness and belonging.
Japan Science and Technology Agency Develops NVIDIA-Powered Moonshot Robot for Elderly Care
Using NVIDIA Isaac Sim and RTX GPUs, humanoid robot research will automate cooking, cleaning, repositioning and other caregiving tasks.
Staying safe in the cold: How to protect older adults from health risks and loneliness
Taking these steps can help ensure the safety and well-being of older loved ones during the cold winter months.