Local seniors will require assistance to maintain their quality of life:
- San Francisco has a significantly larger proportion of older adults and adults with disabilities than both the State of California and the nation. Also, demographic trends over the next 20 years illustrate the substantial growth of the 60+ and 85+ age groups, their increasing functional needs, and preferences for home- and community-based services, all of which necessitate a substantial expansion of long-term care and supportive service capacity.
- Senior adults are the fastest growing age group and will comprise an increasingly larger share of San Francisco’s population. While not all of these individuals will need long-term care and supportive services, this significant increase represents the coming wave of older adults, many of whom will require some form of assistance to maintain their current level of functioning and independence. By the year 2020, the proportion of seniors (60+) will grow by 28%, to 174,000 individuals, who will comprise 21.3% of the total population.
- San Francisco has 14,227 residents who are considered part of the “oldest old” (85+) age category, which is 10.4% of the senior (60+) population and 1.8% of the overall population. This segment of the older population is more likely to be poor and in need of long-term-care services.
- As adults age, the likelihood of functional limitations will increase, thus leading to the need for assistance with daily activities such as dressing, bathing, walking, preparing meals, or grocery shopping. The needs of this growing segment of the population will largely drive expanding demands on the City and County of San Francisco for home- and community-based services. An improvement of current services and expansion of service capacity are needed to meet the projected demands.
Source: San Francisco Department of Aging and Adult Services (DAAS) “Living with Dignity in San Francisco” report
Research findings point towards meditation as an effective preventative and treatment measure in the following areas:
- There is approximately a 50% reduction in visits to a HMO after a relaxation-response based intervention which resulted in estimated significant cost savings:
Behavioral Medicine, Volume 16, pages 165-173, 1990
- Eighty percent of hypertensive patients have lowered blood pressure and decreased medications: – 16% are able to discontinue all of their medications. These results lasted at least three years.
Journal of Cardiopulmonary Rehabilitation, Volume 9, pages 316-324, 1989
- Reversal of Aging Process: Biological age measures how old a person is physiologically. As a group, long-term meditators who had been practicing meditation for more than five years were physiologically twelve years younger than their chronological age, as measured by reduction of blood pressure, and better near-point version and auditory discrimination. Short-term meditators were physiologically five years younger than their chronological age. The study controlled for the effects of diet and exercise. International Journal of Neuroscience, 16: 53-58, 1982.
- Reduced Need for Medical Care: A study of health insurance statistics on over 2,000 people practicing meditation over a five-year period found that meditators consistently had less than half the hospitalization than did other groups with comparable age, gender, profession, and insurance terms. The difference between the meditation and non-meditation groups increased in older-age brackets. In addition, the meditators had fewer incidents of illness in seventeen medical treatment categories, including 87% less hospitalization for heart disease and 55% less for cancer. The meditators consistently had more than 50% fewer doctor visits than did other groups. Psychosomatic Medicine, 49: 493-507, 1987.
- Lower Blood Pressure: In a clinical experiment with elderly African American (mean age 66) dwelling in an inner-city community, meditation was compared with the most widely used method of producing physiological relaxation. Subjects who had moderately elevated blood pressure levels were randomly assigned meditation, Progressive Muscle Relaxation (PMR), or usual care. Over a three-month interval, systolic and diastolic blood pressure dropped by 10.6 and 5.9 mm Hg, respectively, in the meditation group, and 4.0 and 2.1 mm Hg in the PMR group, with virtually no change in the usual care group. A second random assignment study with the elderly conducted at Harvard found similar blood pressure changes produced by meditation over three-months (11 mm Hg for systolic blood pressure). Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 57: 950-964, 1989.
Source: Benson-Henry Institute for Mind-Body Medicine at Harvard Medical School
- Relieve many arthritis symptoms, such as pain, anxiety, stress and depression as well as relieve the fatigue and insomnia associated with fibromyalgia
Source: Arthritis Foundation