Heart disease is more common in people over 65, but treatments are better than ever. That can complicate decision-making for older heart patients.It turns out that the Isley Brothers, who sang that 1966 Motown hit “This Old Heart of Mine (Is Weak for You),” were onto something when they linked age to an aching and flagging heart.Heart disease, the nation’s leading cause of death and disability, has been diagnosed in about 6 percent of Americans ages 45 to 64, but in more than 18 percent of those over 65, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.Old hearts are physiologically different. “The heart gets stiffer as we age,” said Dr. John Dodson, director of the geriatric cardiology program at NYU Langone Health. “It doesn’t fill with blood as easily. The muscles don’t relax as well.”Age also changes the blood vessels, which can grow rigid and cause hypertension, and the nerve fibers that send electrical impulses to the heart. It affects other organs and systems that play a role in cardiovascular health, too. “After age 75 is when things accelerate,” Dr. Dodson said.But in recent years, dramatic improvements in treatments for many kinds of cardiovascular conditions have helped reduce both heart attacks and cardiac deaths.“Cardiology has been blessed with a lot of progress and research and drug development,” said Dr. Karen Alexander, who teaches geriatric cardiology at Duke University. “The medications are better than ever, and we know how to use them better.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe.

Fake nurseries and town squares seem to comfort patients. But some experts wonder whether they are patronizing, even infantilizing.The nursery at RiverSpring Residences in the Bronx is a sunny, inviting space outfitted with a bassinet, a crib with a musical mobile, a few toys, bottles, picture books for bedtime reading and a rack of clothing in tiny sizes.The other morning, Wilma Rosa was there trying to soothe one of its cranky, small charges. “What’s the matter, baby?” she crooned, patting the complainer’s back. “You OK? I want you to go to sleep for a little while.”Ms. Rosa, 76, a memory care resident in assisted living, visits the nursery daily. She has had plenty of experience with babies.She was the oldest girl of eight children, so she handled lots of family responsibilities, she told Catherine Dolan, the facility’s director of life enrichment, who was asking questions to help the memories flow. Later in life, Ms. Rosa worked in a bank and a store; the stories emerged as she cuddled the doll.No actual babies live in this immersive environment, where the fragrance blend includes a talcum scent. Just as no actual sales were taking place at the store down the corridor, another new RiverSpring undertaking.Amid its wooden shelves of clothing, accessories and tchotchkes, the sales clerks were, like Ms. Dolan, staff members trained to interact effectively with residents with dementia.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe.

It doesn’t happen often. But when it does, some residents risk losing everything.Three years ago, when Bob and Sandy Curtis moved into an upscale continuing care retirement community in Port Washington, N.Y., he thought they had found the best possible elder care solution.In exchange for a steep entrance fee — about $840,000, funded by the sale of the Long Island house they had owned for nearly 50 years — they would have care for the rest of their lives at the Harborside. They selected a contract from several options that set stable monthly fees at about $6,000 for both of them and would refund half the entrance fee to their estate after their deaths.“This was the final chapter,” Mr. Curtis, 88, said. “That was the deal I made.”C.C.R.C.s, or life plan communities, provide levels of increasing care on a single campus, from independent and assisted living to nursing homes and memory care. Unlike most senior living facilities, they’re predominantly nonprofit.More than 1,900 C.C.R.C.s house about 900,000 Americans, according to LeadingAge, which represents nonprofit senior housing providers. Some communities offer lower and higher refunds, many avoid buy-in fees altogether and operate as rentals, and others are hybrids.For the Curtises, the Harborside offered reassurance. Mr. Curtis, an industrial engineer who works as a consultant, took a comfortable one-bedroom apartment in the independent living wing. “It was a vibrant community,” he said. “Meals. Amenities. A gym.”Every day he spends time with Sandy, 84, who lives in the facility’s memory care unit, an elevator ride away. The staff members there “treat Sandy with love and care,” Mr. Curtis said. “It would have been wonderful if it could have continued.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe.

Some older Americans have come to depend on virtual consultations with doctors, covered by Medicare. To keep that option in the future, Congress will have to act quickly. Since his cancer diagnosis last year, Kent Manuel has regularly seen an oncologist near his home in Indianapolis. It’s been a tough time: After spinal surgery for paralysis caused by his cancer, he is regaining the use of his legs with physical therapy but still uses a wheelchair.Now, Mr. Manuel said, “I’m dealing with pain.” His oncologist recommended palliative care, a medical specialty that helps people with serious illnesses cope with discomfort and distress and maintain quality of life.So in November, Mr. Manuel, 72, a semiretired accountant, started seeing Dr. Julia Frydman, a palliative care doctor. “We talk through what works and what doesn’t,” he said. “She listens to what I have to say. She’s very flexible.”The first two medications she prescribed to reduce pain had troublesome side effects. On the third try, though, “I think we’ve landed on something that’s working,” he said. His pain hasn’t fully abated, but it has diminished.Dr. Frydman, the senior medical director at a cancer care technology company called Thyme Care, works hundreds of miles away in a Manhattan office. She and Mr. Manuel used a video telemedicine link — an option that barely existed in traditional Medicare before the Covid pandemic, thanks to restrictive federal policies.Medicare expanded its telemedicine coverage substantially in 2020, and the expansion has regularly been renewed. That could all have ended on Dec. 31.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe.

Shuttered drugstores pose a particular threat to older adults, who take more medications than younger people and often rely on pharmacies for advice.In July, a notice appeared on the front door of The Drug Store, the only pharmacy in rural Kernville, Calif. After 45 years, the proprietor wrote regretfully, it would be closing in four days and transferring customers’ prescriptions to a Rite Aid about 12 miles away.As the news spread, “there was a real sense of loss, a sense of mourning,” said Roberta Piazza Gordon, who owns Piazza’s Pine Cone Inn in Kernville. The pharmacy had served as a community crossroads where people chatted with neighbors and with the friendly staff.Its closing also created practical concerns. “We are an aging population,” Ms. Gordon, 69, said of the townspeople.She relied on The Drug Store for her blood pressure and cholesterol medications and for anti-inflammatories after injuring her shoulder. Her husband, who is 70, also regularly filled prescriptions there.At The Drug Store, “you got your flu shot, your Covid shot, your pneumonia shot,” she said.Now those services require a 20- to 30-minute drive to the Rite Aid, which is in Lake Isabella and which Ms. Gordon described as understaffed for its growing number of customers.“On any given day, there’s a line of 10 to 15 people waiting at the pickup window,” she said. Unlike The Drug Store, the Rite Aid doesn’t deliver.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe.

“We’re putting another burden on the elderly that we don’t have to,” one researcher said.Some things you can no longer do with cash: Buy a well-loaded hot dog at any of the five Devil Dawgs eateries in and around Chicago. Order a Vermont Pale Lager from Hill Farmstead Brewery’s taproom in Greensboro Bend, Vt.Attend the annual BeachLife Festival in Redondo Beach, Calif., or buy food, drinks or merchandise there. Purchase admission to the Home of Franklin D. Roosevelt National Historic Site in Hyde Park, N.Y., or to many other sites maintained by the National Park Service.The park service’s expanding no-cash policy exasperated several would-be visitors enough for them to sue in federal court earlier this year.Anne Ronan, 70, a retired attorney, walks around Lake Merritt in Oakland, Calif., a few times a week. After the three-mile-plus trek, she sometimes stops at one of two local cafes. Neither accepts payment in cash.Nor do a restaurant and a cocktail lounge nearby on Grand Avenue. “I don’t find it unusual anymore,” Ms. Ronan said.To buy coffee and a croissant, she routinely carries a credit card in her pocket. She doesn’t find that bothersome, but “as a public policy, it’s not a good thing.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe.

Medical care can be wearying and time-consuming, especially for seniors. Researchers are beginning to quantify the burdens.Deana Hendrickson sometimes feels daunted by the demands of the medical system. “Every body part has a doctor,” she lamented. “I hate it.”Ms. Hendrickson reeled off a long list of her health care providers: a primary care doctor; a cardiologist, because she has mild heart disease and a concerning family history; a lung surgeon and a pulmonologist who oversee an annual scan because of her family history of lung cancer.Plus an ophthalmologist, a gynecologist, a urologist, a podiatrist, a gastroenterologist — “and I just came back from the dentist.”She estimates that with scans, imaging and tests, she spends two dozen days a year engaged with some sort of provider. Most of them, she added, practice in Santa Monica, Calif., where she used to live, now an hour’s drive from her home.At 65, providing five-day-a-week care (with her husband) for three grandsons under 5, she’s reasonably healthy and active. But her regimen “makes me feel like a sick person,” Ms. Hendrickson said.“I’m like an older car that always needs more maintenance. There’s so many other things I’d rather be doing.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe.

They’ve been an unmarried couple for almost 20 years. Both widowed, and now in their 90s, they maintain separate residences in Florida but mostly live together in her home — an increasingly important issue because, a few years ago, she began developing memory loss.Sometimes, she forgets to eat. She has taken some falls, too.“His presence is helpful and supportive,” said Jenna Wells, one of her relatives and a Cornell University psychologist. “He takes her to the doctor. He takes her out to dinner.”But he knows he will have trouble caring for her as they both age and her condition deteriorates. So he proposed to her family that the two of them move together into a continuing care retirement community, where residents can shift from independent to assisted living, then to nursing and memory care units.If they wait too long, he points out, a facility could insist that she enter memory care directly, and he won’t be able to live there with her.The woman’s daughter, who holds her power of attorney, opposes that plan. “She doesn’t like her mother’s gentleman friend, as we call him,” Dr. Wells said. “They’ve never gotten along. There’s mistrust about his living in her house.”For now, with a decision on hold, the couple is managing with home care aides.“As we see this shift, with less of a focus on marriage in older people, this is going to come up a lot,” Dr. Wells said.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe.

Apple is preparing to turn its AirPods Pro 2 into easy-to-use aids for people with mild to moderate hearing loss.In your pocket or purse, you may be toting around small devices that, with the help of new software authorized by the Food and Drug Administration, could soon become inexpensive hearing aids. Millions of people already own them.They’re Apple’s AirPods Pro 2, those white plastic knobs protruding from so many ears in malls and workplaces, on buses and sidewalks. The users may not be among the 30 million American adults reporting some degree of hearing loss; they’re probably just listening to music or podcasts, or talking on their phones.Within weeks, however, consumers will be able to use those AirPods Pro 2 earbuds to bolster their hearing. Last month, Apple software called Hearing Aid and Hearing Test received a green light from the F.D.A., a first for the regulatory agency.With the upcoming software and a compatible iPhone or iPad, users will be able test their hearing. For those with mild-to-moderate hearing loss, the AirPods Pro 2 will adjust sounds in their environments and on their devices.Users will be able to customize their AirPods for volume, tone and balance. All that should allow them to hear better — at least for the devices’ roughly five to six hours of battery life.Apple plans to release the free software later this fall for iPhones running iOS 18 or later and iPads running iPadOS 18 or later, a spokesperson said. A set of AirPods Pro 2 costs $249 from Apple, and less at big box stores or through online retailers.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe.

A pet trust designates a new guardian for companion animals and sets aside funds for their care. Better yet, it’s legally binding.In 2016, Tracy Jennings received shocking news: A lifelong friend, a woman who had a farm with animals great and small, had died suddenly in an accident.A circle of grieving friends hastily arranged new homes for the woman’s beloved animals, including three older horses. But just two weeks after her death, her family had the horses euthanized.“It was very sad, a real kick in the head,” Ms. Jennings said. “But we had no legal rights, and she had nothing in writing.”Ms. Jennings, 66, a semiretired landscape designer, lives on a 10-acre farm in Buffalo, Minn., and has her own menagerie: five cats, a golden retriever, two horses and a donkey named Niles. They would not meet a similar fate, she decided.“There’s nothing sadder than seeing pets wind up at a shelter because the older person who cared for them has died,” she said.She had a lawyer draw up a pet trust, a legal document specifying who will care for her animals when she dies or becomes unable to do so herself. Her trust provides money to cover veterinary bills, food, grooming, boarding and unexpected expenses. It specifies which vet to use. Attached guidelines impart care instructions, including particular foods and animals’ “personality characteristics.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe.