The last phase of life with dementia in Swiss nursing homes: the study protocol of the longitudinal and prospective ZULIDAD study.

Background: The proportion of older people with advanced dementia who will die in nursing homes is constantly growing. However, little is known about the dying phase, the type of symptoms, the management of symptoms and the quality of life and dying in people with advanced dementia. The ZULIDAD (Zurich Life and Death with Advanced Dementia) study aims at extending the current scientific knowledge by providing first data from Switzerland.

Realizing complex delayed intentions in young and old adults: the role of planning aids.

Although it has been suggested that the delayed realization of intended actions should benefit from appropriate intention planning, empirical evidence on this issue is scarce. In three experiments, we examined whether and which planning aids provided in the intention formation phase affect delayed intention realization in young and old adults. One finding was that intention planning directly affected delayed intention realization: instructing participants to include the cue for appropriate intention initiation in their plans benefited delayed performance.

Performance on a declarative memory task is better in high than low cortisol responders to psychosocial stress.

Increased levels of circulating glucocorticoids (GCs) due to stress have been shown to result in enhanced consolidation and impaired retrieval of memory in humans. Several studies have shown that participants may be categorized as high and low responders with regard to GC levels elicited by stress. In the current study, we studied the differential effects of acute psychosocial stress on declarative memory processes in high and low responders.

Personality, aging self-perceptions, and subjective health: a mediation model.

Since the global item of subjective health has emerged as a strong predictor of important health outcomes such as mortality, there have been many attempts to uncover its correlates. In this study, we tested whether personality as assessed via the five-factor model of personality predicted subjective health when physician-rated health and depression were controlled for. We analyzed a cohort of 362 German community-dwelling 60-year-olds from the first wave of the ongoing Interdisciplinary Longitudinal Study on Aging.

Psychosocial stress enhances time-based prospective memory in healthy young men.

Forgetting of intentions (such as to take one's medication) is the most frequent everyday memory failure. No study so far has looked into the possible consequences stress might exert on memory for intentions (i.e.

Cognitive status and development in the oldest old: a longitudinal analysis from the Heidelberg Centenarian Study.

In the present study, we investigated cognitive status, cognitive development and the effect of mortality on cognitive changes in very old age. Analyzing data from the population-based Heidelberg Centenarian Study, results revealed that centenarians differed quite strongly in their cognitive capacities. While about half of the population showed moderate to severe cognitive impairment, one quarter was found to be cognitively intact.