302 Silver Avenue | San Francisco, CA 94112 | 415.334.2500 | www.jhsf.org
302 Silver Avenue | San Francisco, CA 94112 | 415.334.2500 | www.jhsf.org
Residents and employees of the Jewish Home have been involved in research studies over the past year(s) that were completed and published in medical journals in 2007. Publications resulted from two major areas of focus of research supported by the National Institutes of Health and performed in part at the Jewish Home:
1. Sleep, day and night disruption patterns in older patients with dementia were investigated by Drs. Glenna Dowling, chair of Physiological Nursing at the University of California, San Francisco, and Jay Luxenberg, Medical Director of the Jewish Home, in residents of the Jewish Home and Laguna Honda. The results appeared in the Western Journal of Nursing Research (1) and in the Journal of the American Geriatric Society (2). Many staff and residents will remember residents sitting in front of the ‘bright light’ boxes for an hour a day, Mondays through Fridays. And certainly the nurses, pharmacy staff, physicians, and residents remember the trial of melatonin! The authors acknowledge the help and contributions of the administration and staff of the Jewish Home and Laguna Honda in the papers.
The conclusions reached were that the bright light treatment alone did not lead to any improvement toward less activity at night and more activity during the day, but when light exposure was combined with melatonin at night, improvement was seen. This intervention could benefit residents and night staff, but also older people at home and their families who are often disturbed, and lose sleep because of nighttime restlessness and activity of patients with dementia.
2. Improving medication therapy for older adults is my major focus at the Jewish Home. I have been investigating age- and gender-related changes in drug metabolism and responses to medications, including the bad effects. I and my research team, and our red collection containers for samples, have been a part of the Jewish Home scenery for a number of years.
I shared the sum of the knowledge I have gained based on this work and the work of others in two major publications in 2007. The first was published in a journal that is read by clinical pharmacologists, physicians, pharmacists and members of the pharmaceutical industry. It highlighted changes with age that should lead to decreased medication doses, and further differences between older women and men that need particular attention to avoid adverse effects (3).
The second publication was a chapter in the major textbook of cardiology that is read by healthcare professionals. It describes the diseases of the cardiovascular system with aging, and how to choose and adjust treatments for cardiovascular diseases in older patients. Both works acknowledge the Jewish Home in helping to acquire and share this knowledge.
Several other projects are still underway. We look forward to further improvements in the health care of the older patient that will result from this and future research work done at the Jewish Home.
Thank you to all of you – our employees, residents, administration, and our trustees for supporting these activities.