Long-term care insurance is not affordable for most Americans, 90 percent of whom do not have such coverage, reports Governing . But without it, older adults can go bankrupt paying for assisted living care. Washington state has created a public long-term care insurance plan to be funded through payroll taxes. The plan will pay lifetime benefits of up to $36,500 to help people pay for assisted living care. However, the state will not begin making payroll deductions until 2022, and benefits will not kick in until 2025. Hawaii began providing in 2017 up to $70 a day to residents who work while also taking care of senior family members at home. Another Hawaii program provides services to older adults in need of help with daily activities. At the federal level, U.S. Rep. Frank Pallone (D-N.J.) has proposed a Medicare long-term care benefit regardless of income.

New cars are loaded with smart options and entertainment systems unlike any previous period in vehicle manufacturing. But a new study suggests that these amenities may be too distracting, especially for older adults. NBC News reports that a new AAA car safety study conducted by researchers from the University of Utah found that older drivers may find smart features more distracting and demanding than younger drivers. The study consisted of a road test given to participants in two separate groups — a younger group with drivers aged 21-36, and an older group with drivers aged 55-75. Each participant was instructed to drive a 2018 car featuring a number of smart technologies. The drivers were told to send a text message, program music, program a navigation system, and place a telephone call using the car's smart features. The results indicated that older drivers experienced greater cognitive and visual demand than younger drivers when trying to complete these tasks. "Quite frankly, when I was driving, I found myself feeling as if I was driving dangerously because of all of those distractions," said one older driver.

Despite years of warnings from policy wonks and financial professionals, the looming crisis in Social Security has lacked urgency and barely enters the public debate, laments Boston Globe columnist Robert Weisman. One reason may be because once the nearly $3 trillion in the Social Security trust fund starts shrinking, no one will lose benefits right away. But if the funding isn't replenished by 2035, all recipients will face benefit cuts of more than 20 percent, under current projections by Social Security trustees. So, for example, if the average benefit this year is $1,461 a month, a 20 percent cut would reduce that payout by $292. A cut of that size would likely put a serious crimp in a retiree's standard of living: Social Security accounts for at least 90 percent of total retirement income for about a quarter of Americans over 65 and at least 50 percent of retirement income for roughly half, according to the Social Security Administration. The impact of a cutback on beneficiaries and the nation's economy would be huge, considering how heavily so many Americans rely on the program and how quickly other sources of retirement income have dried up. The problem will only intensify as millions more employees retire each year in the coming decade.

A new study suggests that a poor-quality diet may lead to increased frailty among older adults, reports Reuters Health . Researchers tracked more than 2,000 American seniors for four years to measure how their physical condition changed. Participants were either classified as "robust" or "pre-frail," meaning they had one or two symptoms of frailty, at the start of the study. Frailty symptoms included unintentional weight loss, weak hand grip, joint pain, daytime exhaustion, and physical inactivity. During its run, 629 of the adults who started out robust became either frail or pre-frail, with 277 total participants becoming frail. Those adults with poor-quality diets were twice as likely to become frail as those with high-quality diets, while medium-quality diets correlated with a 40 percent likelihood of frailty. Though it has long been hypothesized that low protein intake contributes to frailty, the researchers found something slightly different. Low vegetable protein intake was correlated with a change from robust to pre-frail, but did not appear to have a significant bearing on developing full frailty. Still, "even if it is not certain that higher protein intake prevents the development of frailty, sufficient protein intake is important for older persons to maintain their muscle mass and strength," said the study's lead author, Linda Milou Hengeveld.

One Minnesota high school tennis player's chance find of spare tennis balls at the end of the season has turned into a large-scale collection of unused balls to assist older adults in the state, reports Tennis World USA . Max Fesenmaier took the spare tennis balls to his mother, who offered them to her bosses at a long-term care pharmacy that helps assisted living and retirement communities in Minnesota. That simple action has resulted in the collection of more than 4,000 tennis balls that older adults use on their walkers. Care homes and retirement communities have said that the collection effort makes it easier on them to provide top-line physical care without breaking the bank and regularly buying new tennis balls. "We have residents that walk independently and they put on miles a day. It brings our residents enjoyment to be mobile with their walkers," said Sara McCormick, a worker at a health care center. Some senior communities have made use of the tennis balls beyond walkers, incorporating them into their exercise programs.

Docwire News reports on the success of Brain Safe, an innovative smartphone app that is designed to help older patients avoid taking medications that may lead to dementia. More specifically, the app serves to identify anticholinergics, a specific class of drugs that has been linked to cognitive decline in seniors. These drugs treat a variety of conditions — ranging from diarrhea to asthma to sleep disorders — and are often used by older men and women who are unaware of their potential side effects. Brain Safe uses mobile health technology to offer a convenient solution to this problem.

The chemical interactions that give proteins their shape may be weaker and more numerous than previously recognized, according to chemists at the University of Tokyo whose work was reported on by Medical Xpress . These weak connections provide a new way for such researchers to understand proteins that cause disease. The University of Tokyo team modeled the building blocks of the protein structure that causes Alzheimer's disease, amyloid beta sheets. Their research showed that some atoms too far apart to bond remained in each other's "electron neighborhoods." Professor Tomohiko Ohwada remarked, "This is so strange. It's outside the common sense of organic chemistry." The traditional understanding of chemical bonds has been that atoms must be side by side to share electrons in large molecules. Ohwada's research team calculated that atoms located far apart do not share electrons. However, their electron clouds can still influence each other "through-space bond path interactions" that are common enough to add up to a potentially significant influence on the overall structure of large molecules. "We studied the amyloid beta structure because everyone knows it can cause disease, but nobody really knows how the problematic structure develops," Ohwada concluded.

High-dose influenza vaccines are more effective than standard-dose influenza vaccines for older adults, according to a new study. Clinical Advisor reports that investigators conducted a retrospective cohort study to measure vaccine effectiveness in older men and women across six influenza seasons. Researchers had a pool of 13,770,207 high-dose and 6,151,913 standard-dose vaccinated Medicare beneficiaries aged at least 65 to analyze, and they sought outcomes that hospital encounters ranging from inpatient stays to emergency room visits. They found a slight increase of relative vaccine effectiveness for seniors across all seasons. High-dose vaccines prevented hospital visits more than standard-dose vaccines in four of the six flu seasons and were as effective as standard-dose vaccines in the other two. Researchers also found that high-dose vaccines were consistently more effective than standard-dose vaccines for adults aged at least 85 across all six flu seasons.

According to new research, 64 percent of vitamin B12 injections in older adults may be unnecessary, creating millions of dollars in needless health costs, reports Healio . The Canada-based research team completed a population-based retrospective cohort study using information from Ontario health system administrative databases, ultimately studying adults aged at least 65 who had received one or more intramuscular B12 prescriptions between January 2011 and September 2015. The researchers found that 63.7 percent of intramuscular B12 prescriptions could be classified as inappropriate. Moreover, 35.3 percent of people who received technically appropriate intramuscular B12 prescriptions had only marginally deficient B12 levels. The research team estimates that $34 million are wasted every year on unnecessary B12 injection prescriptions. Daniel G. Federman, a Yale medical school professor, said the study has an interesting premise, but questioned the methodology.

The majority of older Americans are opting not to retire and stay working, reports Fox Business . According to the latest data from the Pew Research Center, almost 30 percent of baby boomers between the ages of 65 and 72 were either working or looking for a job in 2018. The last time engagement was that high for this specific demographic was in the 1950s. According to researchers, the trend is consistent for both males and females. As of 2018, 25 percent of women age 65 to 72 were taking part in the labor force, along with 34 percent of men in the same age range. Older men have not participated at those levels since the early 1970s, according to Pew data. Retirement savings challenges are one of the biggest reasons why Americans are opting to stay employed. According to a recent Government Accountability Office (GAO) study, around 30 percent of Americans over the age of 55 have no retirement savings and no pension plan.