A study published online in the Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine was inspired by four recommendations for action for improving mental health in the workplace, reports HealthDay News . The recommendations include developing a "how to" guide for mental health in the workplace, providing advice and guidance to employers, together with metrics that can be used to design, implement, and assess a mental health in the workplace program. Developing a mental health in the workplace scorecard could help employers assess the extent to which they have implemented best and promising practices and achieved a culture of health and well-being. Furthermore, a "mental health in the workplace" recognition program should be set up to recognize achievements of specific businesses in the field of mental health in the workplace. Finally, development of an executive training program focused on mental health in the workplace could further aid businesses and professionals. "Since most of life is spent in working years, the workplace is an ideal setting for public health-informed initiatives that promote mental and behavioral health and prevent illness," say the report's authors. "It is our expectation that the project initiative outlined here will result in measurable improvements in workers' mental health and well-being."

The American Geriatrics Society (AGS) and the AGS Health in Aging Foundation have announced that Weill Cornell Medicine Professor Tony Rosen will get the 2018 Jeffrey H. Silverstein Memorial Award for Emerging Investigators in the Surgical and Related Medical Specialties, to be presented at the AGS 2018 Annual Scientific Meeting, reports EurekaAlert . Rosen is being honored for his review of more than 100 programs to address the abuse of seniors. Rosen determined most programs focus on raising awareness and public education and developing inter-professional healthcare teams to handle the challenges of physical, social, emotional, financial, and sexual abuse. Rosen's team observed that although many programs hold promise for helping resource-constrained communities, just 2 percent used high-quality study designs. "Expanding access to the care we all need as we age means forging new in-roads for geriatrics across all healthcare specialties," says AGS Board Chair Ellen Flaherty. "As an emergency medicine physician with an interest in older adult care, Dr. Rosen's career — and his expertise — help to exemplify that need, and how we hope to meet those needs at the AGS."

A study published in PLOS One determined long periods of sedentary behavior by middle-aged and older adults affects brain health, and potentially increases the odds for heart disease, diabetes, and premature death, reports UPI . Specifically, sitting impacts regions of the brain critical to memory formation by thinning the medial temporal lobe (MTL), which can be a precursor to cognitive decline and dementia. The researchers asked 35 people between the ages of 45 and 75 about their physical activity levels and the average number of hours each day they spent sitting over the previous week. They underwent a magnetic resonance imaging scan of their MTL, and the researchers observed there is a 2 percent decrease in thickness with each hour of sitting each day. Meanwhile, no significant correlations between physical activity levels and MTL thickness were seen. Furthermore, non-sedentary studies showed additional physical activity improves brain thickness and heart health.

A new study from the ARC Center of Excellence in Population Aging Research (CEPAR) and Neuroscience Research Australia cites seven dementia prevention strategies relying on lifestyle modification, reports Medical Xpress . The report also determined the knowledge-base surrounding the cause of dementia in the senior community varied significantly, making in-depth dementia awareness workshops and community involvement increasingly critical. "While some detrimental attributing factors to dementia such as smoking and alcohol consumption were known, other factors connected to cognitive health were unknown to over 95 percent of the sample population," says University of New South Wales Professor Kaarin Anstey. "This highlights the need for increased local community engagement and advocacy." The researchers also observed direct, indirect, and intangible costs of dementia for the wider society and significant indirect costs to Australia's economy; for example, people with dementia and their caregivers often have to give up their jobs. In addition, CEPAR Director John Piggott says the report makes clear that persons with cognitive impairment were more susceptible to poor financial decision-making. "Our retirement income system is very complex and requires a lot of active decisions," he notes. "We are only beginning to think about how population aging will affect the decision-making ability of older cohorts and what insights psychology and behavioral finance can bring."

A study published in Neurobiology of Aging suggests negative life experiences may actually accelerate the aging of the brain, reports HealthDay News . "We used a new algorithm to predict brain aging after horrible life events ... and negative life events accelerate brain aging by about one-third of a year for each event," says the University of California, San Diego's Sean Hatton. The study involved more than 350 men with an average age of 62. All were veterans who served between 1965 and 1975, and about 80 percent never experienced combat situations, while almost 88 percent were white. The team asked the subjects about negative "fateful life events," including death of a family member or friend, divorce, separation, miscarriage, financial problems, and serious medical emergencies. The men answered questions twice, five years apart, and also underwent magnetic resonance imaging of their brain. The researchers fed this data to their algorithm to calculate predicted brain age, and the algorithm also controlled for factors such as heart disease risk, alcohol use, socioeconomic status, and ethnicity. Hatton says stressful life events likely affect everyone, but people who eat right and exercise and keep alcohol consumption to healthy levels have a "reduced risk of accelerated brain aging and may be mitigating the impact of these events."

A study published in Health Affairs found seniors in the Boston area who received meals at home via programs such as Meals on Wheels made fewer visits to emergency departments and hospital admissions than those who did not, thus reducing their overall medical spending, reports Reuters . The researchers examined healthcare claims from 2014 to 2016 from the Commonwealth Care Alliance of Massachusetts, focusing on members with at least six months of enrollment in one of two meal delivery programs. They were compared to members who were similar but not participating in a meal program. Of the recipients, 133 received meals that were medically tailored for certain conditions, while 624 got untailored meals from Meals on Wheels. More than 2,300 non-meal-recipients were in the comparison cohort. The team determined people in the medically-tailored meal program had fewer emergency room visits and inpatient admissions and less emergency transportation use than the comparison group. Those in the nontailored meal program had fewer emergency visits and lower transportation use but about the same rate of inpatient admissions. In addition, those in the medically-tailored meal programs had lower medical spending, by about $570 a month, than the comparison group, while those in the nontailored meal program had about $156 in lower medical costs a month. The average monthly meal-program costs for each participant were $350 for the medically-tailored program and $146 for the nontailored program.

The Senate on Wednesday confirmed John Ring to the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), restoring Republican control after a nearly four-month interruption, reports Politico Pro . The Senate voted 50-48 to confirm Ring, a Morgan Lewis attorney who has represented businesses in disputes with labor unions. His confirmation gives Republicans a three-person majority on the five-member board, allowing the GOP to resume repealing Obama-era decisions in favor of unions. The NLRB's first priority will be reversing the joint employer standard, which determines the party responsible for labor violations committed by franchisees and contractors. Republicans rolled back the Browning-Ferris Industries decision in December, only to vacate the new ruling weeks later after the NLRB inspector general determined that Trump appointee William Emanuel had a conflict with his former law firm.

A Baycrest-University of Arizona study published in Neuroimage: Clinical suggests the brain reassigns tasks to different regions to compensate for neurodegenerative disorders, reports ScienceDaily . The researchers noted subjects diagnosed with Primary Progressive Aphasia (PPA) harnessed a different brain region to process the meaning of words. Whereas people usually rely on the left side of the brain to comprehend words read or heard, those with PPA exhibit more brain activity on the right, and this observation could be used to help develop targeted treatments to preserve brain function. The team performed brain imaging on 28 adults between 58 and 83, 13 of whom were diagnosed with PPA. As their brains were scanned, participants were asked to read sentences that appeared on a screen, some of which had grammatical errors or mismatched words. People with PPA had more difficulty detecting the errors and demonstrated a slower and smaller spike in brain activity when picking up on incorrect words, while those who performed better had a larger response in the right side of the brain compared to healthy adults. The researchers are currently using this brain activity data to help treat PPA subjects with targeted brain stimulation. Their work also will investigate the short- and long-term effects of this procedure.

Early-onset Alzheimer's accounts for only 5 percent of all Alzheimer's cases, but delayed diagnoses can allow the disease to progress beyond the reach of the most effective early-stage interventions, reports the Jackson Laboratory . For many such people, one option is participation in clinical trials, says Dr. Cliff Singer at Acadia Hospital in Maine. "It at least makes you feel like you're doing something," he notes. Healthy friends and family who want to contribute to the research effort can participate in certain trials as controls or donate funds to support basic science research. Singer hopes to find interventions that can completely stop Alzheimer's in the early stages, limiting the effects to mild impairments such as memory loss. "The best hope for finding real effective therapies, maybe even cures, for Alzheimer's disease lies in the interactions and collaboration between the basic scientist and clinical scientist and clinicians," he says. The Jackson Laboratory has multiple research groups working to understand and treat Alzheimer's, including the lab of JAX Professor Catherine Kaczorowski. Her team concentrates on people who should have Alzheimer's, due to specific genetic predispositions, yet show no symptoms. "Our hypothesis is that they are harboring factors that are protecting their brains," Kaczorowski says. "That is resilience." Once her team figures out those protective factors, they can collaborate with clinicians to develop treatments that incorporate this resilience.

The recent publication from the National Institute on Aging and the Alzheimer's Association of a new biomarker-based definition of Alzheimer's disease could cause confusion for clinicians, according to specialists interviewed by MedPage Today . John C. Morris at the Washington University School of Medicine says "in current practice the obtaining and interpretation of Alzheimer biomarkers will be restricted primarily to physicians who specialize in memory disorders." Meanwhile, Johns Hopkins Professor Kostas Lyketsos notes a key issue "is whether payers will reimburse for the biomarker tests proposed since they are costly and not very well standardized." He also says the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services are "finishing up a study that will test the utility of biomarker testing. The results will be key. We might find ourselves with this very elegant definition of AD and no way to pay to use it clinically." Mount Sinai Hospital Professor Sam Gandy warns the use of the definition will cause estimates of the prevalence of AD to soar. "I think that the lay public penetration of the notion that there is a 'silver tsunami' that will bankrupt and cause enormous misery to millions of families," he says. "I do not see any upside to driving up the 'scare factor.'"