Exploring the knowledge, attitudes and needs of advance care planning in older Chinese Australians.

Aims And Objectives: To identify factors that influence the engagement of Chinese Australians with advance care planning.

Background: Despite the benefits of advance care planning, there is a low prevalence of advance care planning in the Chinese Australian community. Reasons for this are often cited as cultural considerations and taboos surrounding future medical planning and death; however, other logistical factors may also be important.

Prehypertension in midlife is associated with worse cognition a decade later in middle-aged and older women.

Background: previous studies raised the possibility that adverse health effects associated with elevated blood pressure (BP) begin at prehypertension levels (BP = 120-139/80-89 mmHg), yet few studies have examined the effects of prehypertension on cognitive functioning.

Objective: to examine the relationship between BP categories and cognitive functions in middle-aged and older women.

Subjects And Methods: two hundred and forty-seven women from the Women's Healthy Ageing Project had their BP measured twice, at mean ages 50 and 60 years.

Oestrogen alpha-receptor variant and two-year memory decline in midlife Australian women.

Objective: To prospectively examine the influence of the oestrogen-α receptor (ESR1)PvuII polymorphism on changes in memory performance over a 2-year period among 80 midlife postmenopausal Australian women.

Methods: Healthy women aged 56-67 years were administered a battery of four memory (verbal and non-verbal) tasks at baseline and 2 years later.

Results: Carriers of the ESR1 p allele had significantly greater declines in logical memory compared to participants with the PP genotype, independent of demographic characteristics (e.

Hippocampal region-specific contributions to memory performance in normal elderly.

To investigate the relationship between regional hippocampal volume and memory in healthy elderly, 147 community-based volunteers, aged 55-83years, were evaluated using magnetic resonance imaging, the Groton Maze Learning Test, Visual Reproduction and the Rey Auditory Verbal Learning Test. Hippocampal volumes were determined by interactive volumetry. We found greater age-related reduction in the volume of the hippocampal head relative to the tail.

Cognitive function and brain structure correlations in healthy elderly East Asians.

We investigated the effect of age and health variables known to modulate cognitive aging on several measures of cognitive performance and brain volume in a cohort of healthy, non-demented persons of Chinese descent aged between 55 and 86 years. 248 subjects contributed combined neuropsychological, MR imaging, health and socio-demographic information. Speed of processing showed the largest age-related decline.