One in six residents of assisted living facilities is subject to verbal, physical or other aggression by fellow residents in a typical month, and those suffering from dementia are most at risk, new research finds in the first large-scale study of the phenomenon.
Involving 930 residents of 14 licensed assisted living facilities in New York state, the study found incidents of resident-to-resident aggression, also called resident-to-resident elder mistreatment, were nearly as prevalent as they are in nursing homes. That was unexpected, since assisted living residents tend to be less impaired, more mobile and have more privacy than those in nursing homes.
The BCTR’s Karl Pillemer is the first author in the study published in JAMA Network Open. Co-investigators were Dr. Mark Lachs, co-chief of geriatrics and palliative medicine at Weill Cornell Medicine and NewYork-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell Medical Center and the Irene and Roy Psaty Distinguished Professor of Clinical Medicine at Weill Cornell Medicine; and Jeanne Teresi, assistant professor of medical sciences at Columbia University Irving Medical Center and co-director of the Columbia University Stroud Center for Aging Studies.
You can read the writeup of this study in the article posted on the Cornell Chronicle on May 3, 2024 by James Dean.
