Warning Signs: When your elderly parents need to make a change

You've noticed Dad's acting strange. You can't quite explain it but things are different somehow.
When is it time to consider a change in your parents' living situation/lifestyle?
Martha Anderson with the Carilion Center for Healthy Aging, gave me the following tips, a list of signs that mean you may need to talk to your parents about making a change:

• Not taking medications correctly.
• Normally meticulous house is suddenly cluttered and dirty.
• Significant weight loss.
• Change in sleep patterns.
• Prolonged sadness. ...
• Driving issues; unexplained dents in the car, or it takes the parent longer to get to your house than normal.
• Downplayed injury marks or burn marks that are not reported to you.
• Deterioration in personal grooming.
• Extreme suspicion of others.
• Fires in the kitchen or other rooms, burned pots and pans, or evidence of stove being left on.
• Inappropriate behavior of any kind; for example, overdressed at 90 degrees or underdressed at 25 degrees, hoarding food in laundry, buying odd insurance policies, etc.

We'll have more on this subject — and how to introduce to your parents the idea of making a change — in the final installment of "Age of Uncertainty," on Aug. 24.

In the meantime, if you have any tips of your own to share, please leave a comment here.

Thanks, Beth

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