The ambiguous relationships between aging and Alzheimer's disease: a critical literature review.

One reason for the rise in the prevalence of Alzheimer's disease (AD) since the 1980s is the new association between the disease and aging. This paper explores the current representations of AD, questioning their relationships to aging, thanks to a literature review of 49 articles published in French and in English between 1995 and June 2010. Aging appears to be a concurrent diagnosis for AD, both for the lay public and for health professionals, but this confusion, which can be interpreted as a lack of medicalization of memory loss on the conceptual level, does not necessarily constitute an obstacle to medical intervention.

Intergenerational financial transfers and health in a national sample from France.

Financial transfers from parents to their adult children are a growing trend in contemporary societies, and this study investigates the relation of those transfers to their beneficiaries' health in France. In the 2005 nationally representative Gender and Generation Survey, nearly 6% of the subjects aged 25-49 years reported having received financial transfers during the last 12 months. Subjects who had achieved intergenerational upward mobility as well as those who had remained in the upper class were more likely to receive transfers, suggesting that parents rewarded those of their children who achieved most social success.