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Sleepless in the senior home
They call it "assisted living," but the only help most seniors get in these awful joints comes once a month, when they need help finding the checkbook.
A new study shows how seniors in these places suffer from widespread sleep disorders -- problems so bad they're leading to a rapid decline in the quality of life and even conditions like severe depression.
Of course, you'd be depressed too if you lived in some of these homes.
Researchers studied 121 seniors at assisted living facilities in the Los Angeles area and found that 65 percent of them were suffering from sleep problems such as waking up in the middle of the night and the inability to fall asleep in the first place.
Over the course of a six-month follow-up period, those who had trouble sleeping were more likely to come apart at the seams. These patients needed more help with their daily living -- which only shows they're not getting out of that assisted living big house anytime soon.
I was already steaming when I read about this in the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society... but it gets even worse, because these sleepless seniors were also more likely to suffer from worsening depression.
So much for "assisted" living.
And if you think this problem is confined to these homes on the Left Coast, you're missing out on sleep yourself. Nothing can wreck a human being faster than a lack of sleep. Heck, we get in trouble when we "torture" terrorists with sleep deprivation... yet somehow it's perfectly OK when it happens to older Americans living in care facilities.
Remember -- sleep problems aren't normal at any age, even if they are par for the course in assisted living homes.
Needing no assistance, William Campbell Douglass II, M.D.
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