What’s the ideal blood pressure target for older adults with hypertension? Should we aim for a systolic BP of 120 mmHg in all older adults, as suggested by the SPRINT trial? Or should we be more flexible—especially for those who are frail or among the oldest old?

This week on the GeriPal Podcast, we explore the nuances of managing blood pressure in older adults with our guests Dr. Mark Supiano, Dr. Mitra Jamshidian, and Dr. Simon Ascher.

Now, some of our astute GeriPal listeners may say, “wait, didn't you already talk about this with Mark Supiano in a 2017 podcast titled How Low Should We Go with Blood Pressure in Older Adults?” Yes, we sure did, but we decided to revisit this topic as Mitra Jamshidian and Simon Ascher published a new JAGS research study focused on developing a framework to individualize the net benefit of intensive blood pressure control based on the results of the SPRINT trial. Their key finding: most community-dwelling older adults in the SPRINT trial experienced greater benefits than harms from more aggressive blood pressure targets—even those who were older, frail, or on multiple medications.

Join us for an in-depth discussion on balancing risks, benefits, and patient preferences in hypertension management for older adults. Plus, we might just sneak in a little Frank Sinatra for good measure.

In this week’s episode, we dig into two deceptively simple questions: When does someone become a cancer survivor, and should palliative care be in the business of caring for them? Spoiler: It’s more complicated than it seems.

We’ve invited two palliative care doctors to talk about survivorship with us: Laura Petrillo, a physician-researcher at Mass General Hospital and Harvard Medical School, and Laura Shoemaker, an outpatient palliative care doctor at the Cleveland Clinic. This episode is a must-listen for those navigating the evolving landscape of cancer care, and asking not just how we treat cancer, but how we support people who are living with it.

If you want some further reading on survivorship, check out some of these articles:

• A NEJM article titled “Time to Study Metastatic-Cancer Survivorship”

• A ASCO publication that includes a section on survivorship - Patient-Centered Palliative Care for Patients With Advanced Lung Cancer

• A webinar on survivorship - Blending Survivorship and Palliative Care (NCI)
  
  

June Lunney famously characterized the end of life functional course of people with dementia as a slow dwindle over time. Tom Gill later found that people with dementia do indeed have persistent severe disability throughout the last year of their lives.

But from our clinical work, many of us are familiar with people with dementia who experience sudden shocks to their health, think hip fracture, think hospitalization for pneumonia. Those disruptive events or shocks often portend a major decline in function from which people with dementia never fully recover. And they’re often a sign of (or cause of?) worsening prognosis.

Today we talk about disruptive events, or health and wealth shocks. We start with Lauren Hunt, who described the incidence and outcomes of hip fracture and hospitalization for pneumonia in a pair of publications in JAGS, comparing people with dementia who experience these events to people without dementia. We then turn to social events, starting with Rebecca Rodin, who studied the effect of widowhood on mortality and function for people with dementia, cancer, and organ failure, published in JAMA Network Open. Finally, we turn to Tsai-Chin Cho, who studied the impact of a wealth shock (loss of 75%+ of wealth in a short time period) on cognitive decline in 4 countries. Tsai-Chin’s article, published in Lancet Healthy Longevity, found a tantalizing hint that countries with stronger safety nets had lower incidence of wealth shocks, and less of a deleterious impact of the wealth shock on cognitive function.

Wait, so one key message is that social health is linked to physical and cognitive health?!? And the government can do something about that?!? Yes indeed, we like to hammer that home regularly, dear listeners.

And I enjoyed singing Leonard Cohent’s Who By Fire, about the many ways people might die…you know…typical uplifting GeriPal song lyrics!

-Alex Smith

Additional links mentioned by Tsai-Chin Cho:

-Wealth shocks and mortality in the US

-Change in marital status as a risk for wealth shock