What age will disability force you into a nursing home?

(STUDY FINDS) – What’s the average age of a person entering long-term care? Researchers from the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus now have an answer to this difficult question — as well as how long older adults will likely live with a disability before opting for a nursing home. It turns out the number is now 84 years-old, usually preceded by months of both severe disability and escalating caretaking by the person’s loved ones at home.

As a geriatrician, or physician specially trained to treat older adults, Kenneth Lam, MD, MAS, has spent years working with families to determine when it’s time for older relatives to move into a nursing home or assisted living facility, as well as what kind of specific services they’ll need.

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“They might be deteriorating and becoming less able to care for themselves, and the family members would ask us, ‘Where do you think this person should go? What services should they get? Should they move into an assisted living facility, or should they move into a nursing home?,’” says Lam, assistant professor of geriatric medicine in the University of Colorado School of Medicine, in a media release. “In my clinical practice, I had honed a sense of where people belong, but as I started to move into research, it kept bothering me: This is a really big decision, and I had never seen any data around it.”

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