Prognosis Communication in Late-Life Disability: A Mixed Methods Study.

Importance: Long-term prognosis informs clinical and personal decisions for older adults with late-life disability. However, many clinicians worry that telling patients their prognosis may cause harm.

Objective: To explore the safety of and reactions to prognosis communication in late-life disability.

Bringing functional status into a big data world: Validation of national Veterans Affairs functional status data.

Background: The ability to perform basic daily activities ("functional status") is key to older adults' quality of life and strongly predicts health outcomes. However, data on functional status are seldom collected during routine clinical care in a way that makes them available for clinical use and research.

Objectives: To validate functional status data that Veterans Affairs (VA) medical centers recently started collecting during routine clinical care, compared to the same data collected in a structured research setting.

"Everyone else gets ice cream here more often than I do--It burns me up"--Perspectives on Diabetes Care from Nursing Home Residents and their Doctors.

Background: To explore the perspectives of nursing home (NH) residents with diabetes and their doctors regarding the burdens of living with diabetes and diabetes treatments.

Methods: Qualitative study of nursing home residents aged 65 and older with diabetes (n = 14) and nursing home physicians (n = 9) at a Department of Veterans Affairs nursing home (known as the Community Living Center). A semi-structured interview was used to elicit nursing home residents' and physicians' perspectives on the burden of diabetes and diabetes treatments.