Caring Currents

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This week, two nutrition studies swept across the newspapers and airwaves. Did you see them? Here are the short-and-sweet headline versions:

1. Soda pop causes pancreatic cancer.

2. Chocolate prevents stroke.

These studies got a lot of attention because these are popular foods. One study warns of a serious disease we all fear, while the other gives you another reason to eat something you want to eat anyway. But are they true? To be honest, even after taking a look at the actual data, I'm still not sure, and I'm not sure the experts know either. But they make sense and fit with what we already know about nutrition, so they do make important points.

The Problem with Soda

Most soft drinks are made with highly concentrated sweeteners, like high-fructose corn sweetener. Even the "healthier" versions made with good old-fashioned sugar deliver it in a highly concentrated dose. The job of the pancreas is to secrete insulin when needed to process sugar, so when you hit your body with a wallop of sugar, the pancreas goes into overdrive...  Read more

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Routine is an effective way to smooth the day for people with dementia. Unfortunately, too much repetition can leave a dementia caregiver feeling like a dog chasing her tail in circles -- or like poor, stressed Bill Murray in the old movie "Groundhog Day," about the man doomed to repeat the same day over and over again.

Fortunately it is possible to snap yourself out of a caregiving rut. Some strategies to try:

• Keep a diary of the highs and lows of your day.

You may think your "whole situation" makes you stressed, but it's more likely that there are some very specific triggers to what makes you especially unhappy – as well as especially happy. Without paying conscious attention, it may be hard to ferret this out. But really knowing your triggers is the first step to being able to change (or protect) them.

• Focus on what you can change, rather than what you can't.

You can't change your loved one's progressive disease...  Read more

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What do you do when your beloved father dies and your mother, who was his primary caregiver, won't honor his memory the way you feel she should? That's what Joanie W. is facing. It's a common family dilemma, yet no one seems to talks about it. Final arrangements and how we deal with them bring up such strong feelings, and the public aspect of a funeral or memorial service -- or lack thereof -- can trigger feelings of shame, embarrassment, sadness and -- yes, it's true -- rage. Here's Joanie's story.

"My dad died recently after a long battle with heart disease and diabetes. His last years were really tough as his health went downhill, and he became really difficult to deal with. He was sour and bad-tempered and complained all the time, and my mom took the brunt of it. In his last days, once he went to the hospital, it was like she washed her hands of him. I flew out and stayed with him and basically ended up making all the final decisions...  Read more

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Patricia K. got the e-mail just a few weeks after Christmas. "The holidays had come and gone, and once again no one had heard from my sister Betsy -- not even a card," Patricia says.

Then suddenly, there was an e-mail in her in box. "The subject line was pure Betsy -- `I hear Mom's sick; why didn't anyone call me?!' Well, gosh, we didn't have her number -- we didn't even know what state she was living in."

Betsy, just three years younger than Patricia, had had a stormy relationship with her parents and sister since high school. She married young, a guy they thought was a lowlife. She had a baby, and proceeded to live one of those lives that lurches from disaster to disaster.

For a long time, the only time anyone heard from Betsy was when she called to ask for money, usually with her son as the excuse. She needed money to take care of Petey, she needed money to send Petey to school, she needed money to take Petey to the doctor...  Read more

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I've heard so many variations on this one I could fill a page just with the individual stories. Here on the West Coast, it often involves one of the many freestanding casinos on tribal land, which are all too easily accessible from nearby towns. Or bus trips to Las Vegas or Reno organized by senior groups. A friend in Shreveport tells me her mom couldn't stay away from the riverboat casinos; another friend's dad got in over his head playing Saturday night (and then Friday night, and then Wednesday afternoon) poker. And it isn't just our parents; I recently listened as a group of people shared stories of family members -- often brothers, nephews, cousins -- who got sucked into online gambling.

You've heard the rationale before: "I just play the penny slots. What's wrong with that?" "I've played poker for years; you want me to stop now?" And the kicker: "I have so few sources of enjoyment left...  Read more

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Watching those close to us age is stressful for everyone, but certain situations seem guaranteed to set family members against one another and start families unraveling at the seams.

And nothing causes more distrust and divisiveness among siblings than feeling they're not being treated equally or that one sibling is taking advantage of a parent at the others' expense. Case in point: Our message boards at Caring.com are filled with discussions about difficult family situations involving money, uneven sharing of caregiving responsibilities, dishonesty, or all three.

When One Sibling Repeatedly Borrows Money From a Parent and Other Siblings Resent It

This story plays out in all sorts of ways, but the central player is an adult child (or cousin, or nephew...) in difficult straits who frequently goes to aging parents asking for "loans," help with living arrangements, or out and out handouts...  Read more

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Recently I heard from Sarah, an old friend, about a hard situation she's in that I'm sure many Caring.com readers can relate to. Sarah's mother-in-law moved in with her and her family more than a year ago, and since then Sarah's had a really hard time dealing with her husband's siblings, who aren't helping out as much as they promised.

But what Sarah's finding even more stressful is that the expense -- both in direct costs and in time lost from work -- of having an elderly person join the household is much greater than she expected. And what really galls her? No one else in the family seems motivated to chip in. "This summer it really got to me," Sarah told me. "We were stuck here in the Midwest heat, working ourselves to the bone keeping up with our jobs and caring for mom, while my husband's sister's family went to the Bahamas, and his brother and his wife spent weeks at their lake cabin...  Read more

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Can dementia be predicted by what happens in someone's brain when they see an iconic celebrity like Marilyn Monroe, Bob Hope, Johnny Carson, George Clooney, or Britney Spears?

I realize it's odd to think about Marilyn Monroe and the brain, of all body parts, but bear with me.

Now that we can "see" the inner workings of the brain thanks to better imaging tests, scientists are devising clever ways of watching memory in progress. And one of the simpler ideas, reported in last week's [Neurology] (http://www.neurology.org/cgi/content/abstract/73/8/612), compares brain activity when a person is shown different names. Turns out people at high risk of developing Alzheimer's struggle just as much to recognize Marilyn or Britney as they do non-famous names like Irma Jacoby or Thomas Fitzpatrick.

In fact, they struggled six times harder than people at low-risk for Alzheimer's (as determined by family history and [genetic factors] (http://www...  Read more

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Last week I explained the most common money styles and how to figure out which one is yours. You can also use this list of common money styles to figure out the money styles of your spouse, parents, siblings, or others.

Knowing how the important people in your life view money (especially in a caregiving situation) -- and how those views differ from yours -- will do wonders for your ability to get along and avoid the pitfalls that tend to trigger arguments and blow ups.

Here, some of the most common ways family members with different money styles push each other's buttons -- and what to do when that happens.

Money Styles Conflict #1: Hoarder vs. Spender

One of you saves for a rainy day, the other wants what she wants and resents feeling deprived, especially where comfort is concerned.

How to Resolve: The ignition spark in this conflict tends to be status; spenders are status-conscious, and spend to keep up with others...  Read more

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This week health news experts were all agog over an Australian study that unveiled a treatment using tiny cells that perform like a "Trojan horse," sneaking chemotherapy agents into cancer cells.

Given that it was a preliminary study performed in mice, why is this news so exciting? The study points the way to a new approach to cancer treatment, one that could eradicate 100 percent of cancer cells and leave cancer patients much less injured by the side effects of chemotherapy treatment.

Here's the central issue: In killing off cancer cells, chemotherapy also injures healthy cells. It's a "one size fits all" treatment; toxic chemotherapy agents cut a swath across the entire body and all body systems. And even so, a small percentage of the cancer cells produce proteins that make them resistant to the chemo; these cells remain in the body and eventually proliferate, causing a recurrence.