Marta Hill Gray In today’s challenging economic environment, low-cost assisted living communities serving older adults are few and far between. The waitlist for an independent living apartment at our senior living community, Culpepper Garden, currently is more than two years long. The waitlist for our assisted living wing is even longer.  As we mark National Fair Housing Month, we must recognize the growing number of older Americans without a roof over their heads — millions of them forced to live on very low incomes, unable to afford housing, food and medical care. As it stands, the Uni ..read more

John O’Connor It’s a bit exhausting to keep writing about ways good intentions from our regulatory agencies keep fueling disastrous outcomes. The latest blow came earlier this week with an announcement from the Labor Department. It unveiled a final rule aimed at broadening overtime protections for salaried workers. The new overtime rule will see the salary threshold climb from the current $35,568 to $43,888 by July 1 and subsequently to $58,656 Jan. 1. The initial raise follows the department’s existing methodology for determining the threshold, whereas the subsequent increase adopts its new ..read more

John O’Connor When it comes to the bottom line, more than a few senior living operators now find themselves hitting rock bottom. It’s bad enough that growth and revenue projections they counted on for 2024 are simply not going to happen. Worse, still, the numbers might trail what was recorded a year ago. Many corner office types are demanding answers. After all, there should be plenty of reasons for continued optimism: The customer-base demographics have never looked better — and will only improve. And there’s no shortage of dealmaking going on, as eager buyers snap up whatever communitie ..read more

Emerald Communities completes $63M expansion project at Redmond, WA, CCRC … CBRE arranges sale of 4 Dallas-area senior living properties to Artemis Real Estate Partners and Bridgewood Property Co. joint venture … REDICO opens independent living community in Lansing, MI, suburb ..read more

(HealthDay News) — Northeastern US seafood consumers may be exposed to per- and polyfluoroalkyl substance (PFAS) concentrations that potentially pose a health risk, according to a study published online April 12 in Exposure and Health. Kathryn A. Crawford, PhD, from the Environmental Studies Program at Middlebury College in Vermont, and colleagues surveyed 1,829 New Hampshire residents in June 2021 to determine consumption frequency, portion size, types and sources of seafood among adults and children (aged 2 to 11 years). Additionally, the researchers purchased the most commonly consumed spe ..read more

(HealthDay News) — Self-administered acupressure (SAA) is an efficacious and cost-effective approach to relieve knee pain in middle-aged and older adults with probable knee osteoarthritis (OA), according to a study published online April 19 in JAMA Network Open. Wing-Fai Yeung, PhD, from the Hong Kong Polytechnic University, and colleagues evaluated the effectiveness of SAA taught via a short training course on reducing knee OA pain in middle-aged and older adults (aged 50 years and older). The analysis included 314 participants randomly assigned to acupressure twice daily for 12 weeks o ..read more

(HealthDay News) — Middle-aged Black women with better heart health are less likely to show a decline in mental function, according to a study published online April 24 in the Journal of the American Heart Association. Imke Janssen, PhD, from the Rush University Medical Center in Chicago, and colleagues sought to determine the impact of cardiovascular health (CVH) on decline in the two domains of cognition that decline first in white and Black women at midlife. The analysis included 363 Black and 402 white women participating in the Study of Women’s Health Across the Nation. Cognition was mea ..read more

(HealthDay News) — ChatGPT shows promise in polypharmacy management and deprescribing medications among the elderly, according to a study published online April 18 in the Journal of Medical Systems. Arya Rao, from Harvard Medical School in Boston, and colleagues evaluated ChatGPT performance in polypharmacy management via its binary (yes/no) deprescribing decisions in standardized clinical vignettes. The researchers found that in yes/no binary deprescribing decisions, ChatGPT universally recommended deprescribing medications regardless of activities of daily living (ADL) status in patien ..read more

Photo credit: ER Productions Limited/Getty Images More than 80% of nursing homes do not meet the updated requirements in the final staffing mandate from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, according to new analysis from media outlet KFF. Those findings further amplify the chorus of concerns raised by providers following the news that CMS was raising its proposed requirement of 3.0 hours of care per resident per day to 3.48 in Monday’s final rule.  CMS leaders, including Administrator Chiquita Brooks-LaSure, attempted to address sector questions and concerns at a press event ..read more

The study was led by Feixiong Cheng, PhD. Photo credit: Cleveland Clinic Cleveland Clinic researchers are using artificial intelligence to confirm the link between the gut microbiome and Alzheimer’s disease. Using a variant of AI called machine learning, the team scrutinized nearly 1.1 million potential metabolite-receptor pairs to forecast the probability of each interaction influencing Alzheimer’s disease. The data provides one of the most comprehensive roadmaps to studying metabolite-associated diseases to date, the authors claim. “Our findings provide further weight to re-purposing this e ..read more