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A Place for Mom and Aging Care

What to Do After a Dementia Diagnosis: 10 Steps

Understand what to expect with a dementia diagnosis. This can help you feel more confident and empowered to create a dementia care plan that fits your relative’s needs and improves their quality of life. Learn about proven lifestyle changes, like exercise (physical and mental) and brain-healthy diets, clinically shown to slow the progression of dementia. There’s no cure for Alzheimer’s or dementia, but specialized dementia treatments are available to help with symptoms. Things like behavior mana...

Siblings Fighting Over Elderly Parents: Problems and Solutions

Adult siblings don’t always see caregiving needs the same way. One child may have the impression that a parent is doing fine at home, while another feels they need help. Or, the adult children realize that their loved one needs care, but the parent refuses to see it as an option. These decisions can lead to a divide between siblings. Solution: Get a professional assessmentHelping seniors make the right decisions for their care needs can be difficult when siblings are fighting. That’s why an outs...

Memory Care Classes: How to Become a Memory Care Specialist

In order to find the right memory care community or caregiver for a loved one, it’s good to know what qualifications memory care-specific staff are required to have in your area. Most states require some specialized training for caregivers in memory care-licensed facilities. However, requirements vary greatly from state to state. While some states may require intensive hours of ongoing caregiver training, others have no mandated training at all. More than half of all states don’t require memory...

Pneumonia in Seniors: Symptoms, Treatment, and Prevention

Seniors 65 and over are at an increased risk of death from pneumonia, especially if they have preexisting health problems. If a senior has chronic health conditions, like heart or kidney disease, pneumonia can progress rapidly and become increasingly difficult to treat. In extreme cases, doctors might discontinue all treatment and put the senior on hospice.[01,02] It’s suspected that the following health conditions and factors increase the risk of death from pneumonia in adults over 65:[03] Hear...

Elderly Skin Bruising: Causes and Prevention

Bruising in seniors is primarily caused by the skin’s reduced thickness and resilience due to certain conditions of aging. As we age, skin cells don’t reproduce as quickly as before. This can result in thinner layers of skin and the loss of protective connective tissue, making veins and capillaries more open to damage. The aging process might also involve a higher intake of medications and a reduction in the ability to absorb nutrients. This also makes the skin more vulnerable to bruising. Elder...

UTIs in the Elderly: Symptoms, Treatments, and Prevention

Seniors may not notice a mild UTI infection right away, as the physical symptoms may be more subtle in older adults. Physical symptoms of a UTI include: Burning, painful sensation with urinationFrequent, intense urge to urinate even when there’s little urine to passA feeling that the bladder is not completely emptiedBlood in the urineCloudy or foul-smelling urineSometimes a senior may not have physical symptoms at all until the infection has become severe.[01] For instance, burning during urinat...

Colonoscopies in Seniors: Guidelines, Risks & Alternatives

Doctors with the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force recommend that adults aged 50 to 75 have a colonoscopy screening, even without symptoms. Colonoscopies in people age 76 to 85 should be limited to a case-by-case basis due to higher risks associated with this procedure in the elderly. This age group should consider alternatives to colonoscopy, like stool sample tests and CT colonography.[01] The following are the guidelines for the frequency with which these screenings should be performed:[01]...

End-Stage Dementia: Care Options and What to Expect

Dementia as a general condition is broken into seven stages, according to the Global Deterioration Scale for Dementia (GDS), a comprehensive tool used to assess patients’ emotional and physical symptoms. Stages 6 and 7 are the final stages of dementia. Stage 7 is the last before death, and here, the person with dementia experiences a rapid decline in most abilities.Education, empathy, and attentiveness to end-stage dementia signs are crucial to compassionate dementia care. Learning how your love...

Insomnia in the Elderly: Causes and Best Treatments

A poor and inconsistent sleep routine can be detrimental to seniors. Older adults need the same amount of sleep as younger people to restore their bodies. Experts recommend seven to nine hours of quality sleep for seniors each night. Long-term poor sleep can lead to a decline in overall physical and mental health, increasing the risk of cognitive decline as well as falls.[01,02] “In addition to a reduced quality of life, long-term health consequences of poor sleep include high blood pressure, we...

Your Complete Guide to Paying for Long-Term Care

Long-term care costs vary significantly based on the type and level of care provided. The chart below provides a cost comparison by care type at a glance. A Place for Mom’s proprietary senior living cost data represent the median of what seniors actually paid in 2024 for their room and board plus any necessary care, services, and add-on fees. Proprietary home care cost data was collected March 2025. Senior living typeNational median costHome care$33 per hourIndependent living$3,145 per monthCare...

Adjusting to Living with Elderly Parents: Expert Tips

Lynette and Marty Whiteman were getting used to losing sleep. After Lynette’s aging mother Mildred moved into their New Jersey home from her retirement community, she regularly woke the couple, asking for help at odd hours. To Mildred, the requests were urgent, but Marty didn’t see changing light bulbs or resetting microwave clocks as tasks to crawl out of bed for. Mildred’s increasing care needs — and midnight knocks on the couple’s door — were taking a toll on their marriage. Tension over care...
A Place for Mom •

2024 Cost of Senior Living and Long-Term Care Report

As the nation’s largest senior living advisory service, A Place for Mom aims to help seniors and their families find the best care fit for their individual needs. Only about 34% of families surveyed by A Place for Mom were prepared for senior living costs in 2023, while over 60% found cost and financing information helpful when selecting a community. The data presented in this report paints a clear picture of how much seniors pay for care.We’ve worked with providers from our network of over 17,0...

A State-by-State Guide to Senior Living Regulations | A Place for Mom

Assisted living, memory care, and independent living communities are generally regulated by state governments. This means that rules and operation requirements vary by state and by the type of care a community provides.
Learn more about how senior living communities are regulated so you can make informed care decisions.
In most cases, a state’s health or social services agency licenses and sets regulation requirements for assisted living. This same agency typically investigates complaints relate...

Guide to VA Long-Term Care Benefits | A Place for Mom

VA benefits for long-term careSenior care can be costly, but for some U.S. military veterans and their surviving spouses, certain veterans benefits may be available to help offset long-term care costs. The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, or VA, offers benefits for those who served in the U.S. Armed Forces, including Aid and Attendance and Housebound benefits, which provide financial assistance for long-term care.Sadly, many veterans are completely unaware of the benefits available to them —...

Electric Literature

Electric Literature •

Decolonize Your Bookshelf With These Books by Native American Writers - Electric Literature

Since Thanksgiving is a time when the collective American imagination envisions a peaceful meal shared between colonizer and colonized, where both appear to share a mutual understanding and benefit, why not make this fantasy a reality by exercising some empathy-for-the-other muscles and read literary works written from their perspective?

My list has no blood quantum standards and is complete with rez and urban, past and present, perspectives alike, which I feel is the best way to represent the...
Electric Literature •

Samantha Hunt Transforms the Mermaid Myth into a Feminist Allegory - Electric Literature

The Seas, Samantha Hunt’s first novel, is as disturbing as it is beautiful. It is a literary equivalent of the Rubin vase, the ambiguous image, multistable perception that shocks us back and forth between two possible realities of a story all dependent upon the gaze of the reader at particular moments. Our narrator is either a real mermaid or a schizo-affective depressive circling down the drain of a heavy mental breakdown. We think we have to choose between these sides of perception but we don’...
Electric Literature •

Tommy Orange Gives Voice to Urban Native Americans - Electric Literature

Tommy Orange is the author of There There, a novel that circles the lives of Oakland, California-based urban Indians. Tommy’s work offers varied interpretations of Native life, culture and inherited trauma, lived in and through the city. He spoke to me thoughtfully about the potential social implications of his book, so needed right now for urban Natives — living too long as ghosts in the American city.

We grew up not far from one another. I am only an hour further east, inland to Stockton, Cal...