Spirituality may help women manage chronic illness
July 8, 2009(PhysOrg.com) -- As women increasingly outlive men, they face increasing risks of chronic illness as they age.
How women draw strength from spirituality and social networks is the focus of an interdisciplinary research team from the Frances Payne Bolton School of Nursing and the Mandel School of Applied Social Sciences.
Principal investigators Camille Warner and Kathryn Betts Adams are working to find out if these factors play a role in how women 65 years and older manage and cope with such chronic illnesses as arthritis, high blood pressure, diabetes, cancers, heart disease and other health issues.
According to the National Center for Chronic Disease Prevention and Promotion, 80 percent of older adults have one or more chronic illness, and half of older people have more than one.
“Women traditionally are the healthcare managers in the family,” said Warner. “But how well they are coping and managing their own health problems is increasingly important as women live longer and many times live alone in the community.”
Adams and Warner will recruit women living with family members or on their own in community housing,without assisted living support to participate in the study. They will survey 125 women over the course of the one-year pilot study. Volunteers will be asked about spiritual areas of their lives and also about what they do to keep active and involved with friends and others around them.
A follow-up questionnaire six months later will help track any changes in their outlooks on life and whether marshalling social help or tapping into spiritual beliefs impacts their overall sense of wellbeing. The investigators also want to know if these lines of support help women manage their chronic illnesses.
From initial data collected, Warner and Adams hope to take the next step and design an intervention to help both social and healthcare workers assist older women manage their illnesses using a variety of coping skills.
-
Obesity risks increase after menopause
Oct 25, 2007 |
not rated yet |
0
-
Men-women life expectancy gap narrows
May 01, 2006 |
not rated yet |
0
-
New survey evidence on the health and well-being of England's older generation
Mar 23, 2007 |
not rated yet |
0
-
Triple threat to health: Lifelong abuse creates serious consequences for older African-American women
Feb 24, 2009 |
not rated yet |
0
-
Women live longer, not better, largely because of obesity and arthritis
May 03, 2009 |
not rated yet |
0
-
Engineers build first sub-10-nm carbon nanotube transistor
Feb 01, 2012 |
4.9 / 5 (31) |
30
-
Something old, something new: Evolution and the structural divergence of duplicate genes
Jan 31, 2012 |
4.6 / 5 (7) |
1
-
The hidden nanoworld of ice crystals: Revealing the dynamic behavior of quasi-liquid layers
Jan 30, 2012 |
5 / 5 (3) |
1
-
Stock market network reveals investor clustering
Jan 27, 2012 |
3.9 / 5 (23) |
8
-
Of microchemistry and molecules: Electronic microfluidic device synthesizes biocompatible probes
Jan 26, 2012 |
5 / 5 (1) |
0
-
Classical and Quantum Mechanics via Lie algebras
Apr 15, 2011
- More from Physics Forums - Independent Research
More news stories
Human cognitive performance suffers following natural disasters, researchers find
Not surprisingly, victims of a natural disaster can experience stress and anxiety, but a new study indicates that it might also cause them to make more errors - some serious - in their daily lives. In their upcoming Human Fa ...
Medicine & Health / Psychology & Psychiatry
30 minutes ago |
not rated yet |
0
Both maternal and paternal age linked to autism
Older maternal and paternal age are jointly associated with having a child with autism, according to a recently published study led by researchers at The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston (UTHealth).
Medicine & Health / Psychology & Psychiatry
3 hours ago |
not rated yet |
0
|
Curry spice component may help slow prostate tumor growth
Curcumin, an active component of the Indian curry spice turmeric, may help slow down tumor growth in castration-resistant prostate cancer patients on androgen deprivation therapy (ADT), a study from researchers ...
4 hours ago |
5 / 5 (3) |
0
|
Team isolates nerve cells involved in storing long term memory and gene proteins associated with them
(Medical Xpress) -- A research team in Taiwan has succeeded in isolating two nerve cells in fruit fly brains that are believed to be the major players in allowing for the formation of long term memories. Furthermore, ...
Seeing colors in music, tasting flavors in shapes may happen in life's early months
Famed violinist Itzhak Perlman sees a deep forest green whenever he plays a B-flat on his Stradivarius' G string. The A on the E string is red.
Medicine & Health / Psychology & Psychiatry
6 hours ago |
4.5 / 5 (2) |
0
|
The power of estrogen -- male snakes attract other males
A new study has shown that boosting the estrogen levels of male garter snakes causes them to secrete the same pheromones that females use to attract suitors, and turned the males into just about the sexiest ...
Putting the squeeze on planets outside our solar system
(PhysOrg.com) -- Using high-powered lasers, scientists at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and collaborators discovered that molten magnesium silicate undergoes a phase change in the liquid state, abruptly ...
New error-correcting codes guarantee the fastest possible rate of data transmission
Error-correcting codes are one of the triumphs of the digital age. Theyre a way of encoding information so that it can be transmitted across a communication channel such as an optical fiber o ...
Humans may have helped the decline of African rainforests 3000 years ago
(PhysOrg.com) -- Large areas of rainforests in Central Africa mysteriously disappeared over three thousand years ago, to be replaced by savannas. The prevailing theory has been that the cause was a change ...
Fool's gold may prove an unlikely alternative to overexploited catalytic materials
Catalytic materials, which lower the energy barriers for chemical reactions, are used in everything from the commercial production of chemicals to catalytic converters in car engines. However, with current catalytic materials ...
Could Venus be shifting gear?
(PhysOrg.com) -- ESAs Venus Express spacecraft has discovered that our cloud-covered neighbour spins a little slower than previously measured. Peering through the dense atmosphere in the infrared, the ...