Older Adult Related Content

Under McLean’s agreement with Rippl Care, McLean will provide strategic consultation for the co-development of the Rippl Academy’s core curriculum, the proprietary professional education program for Rippl’s care teams to support older adults living with dementia and their family caregivers. To...

Dementia. The mere mention of cognitive decline is usually enough to send chills down the spines of older Americans and their family members. While there is broad recognition of the devastating impact of living with illnesses that include symptoms affecting memory and thinking, such as Alzheimer’s...

Mounted on the wall in David’s room at an assisted living facility west of Boston is a small, white box. It emits a low hum, but otherwise, it is hard to know it is there. But, while people in the room may not notice the box, the box is noticing everything that goes on in the room. The box houses a...

On October 1, Ipsit Vahia, MD, took on the newly created roles of associate chief of the Division of Geriatric Psychiatry and director of Digital Psychiatry Translation at McLean Hospital. Previously, Vahia had been medical director for both McLean’s Geriatric Psychiatry Outpatient Services and...

Rosalie Rudnick collected friends like she collected Caucasian rugs—easily, passionately, and in large numbers. “The world loved Rosalie,” said Mitch, her husband of 60 years. “She was charming and befriended everyone who came near her.” Even after Alzheimer’s disease robbed her of almost everything...

On October 30, 2020, a beloved and respected nurse retired from McLean Hospital. Cindy Ruscitti, MSN, RN, the Older Adult Program’s nurse director, started working at McLean as a staff nurse on December 3, 1975. And—fortunately for its staff and patients—she continued to work at McLean for more than...

Older adults are especially vulnerable to the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic—with higher risks of severe complications and death, and potentially greater difficulties accessing care and adapting to technologies such as telemedicine. A viewpoint article published in the Journal of the American...

A team of investigators from McLean Hospital and Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) reported that reprogramming a patient’s own skin cells to replace cells in the brain that are progressively lost during Parkinson’s disease (PD) is technically feasible. PD is the second most common...

As Americans age and the incidence of dementia increases, McLean Hospital is embarking on a path to provide more specialized care for a subset of patients with the behavioral problems that accompany the advanced stages of the illness. According to the World Health Organization, mental health and...

Even with the best protocols in place, treating psychiatric patients who have tested positive for COVID-19 poses challenges for mental health care professionals. But what if there was a way to monitor patients from a safe distance? A team of clinicians from McLean Hospital’s Division of Geriatric...

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) has awarded McLean Hospital’s Neuroregeneration Institute (NRI) a $6 million grant over 5 years to further its groundbreaking research on stem cell-based therapy for Parkinson’s disease (PD). The NIH developed the Cooperative Research to Enable and Advance...

As a psychiatrist in charge on the Geriatric Psychiatry Inpatient Services at McLean, Alexis Freedberg, MD, often sees patients who are seeking mental health treatment for the first time in their lives. Older adults may experience age-related cognitive changes, such as dementia, or they may struggle...

Around the time Joan Gillis, MSW, LICSW, left the business world to start a family, her father had a stroke. “I found myself as the caregiver for my father and my children,” she said. Since then, helping both older adults and future generations has been central to her professional life. Caring for...