What Does Brain Health Mean?
When you’re talking about brain health and your senior, what all does that cover? It turns out that there’s a lot more to having a healthy brain than you might have thought. There’s how well your senior is able to think, and then there are other processes, too, that are just as important and that impact her directly.
Senior Care in Northbrook IL: Brain Health
Cognitive Health Is Most Obvious
When most people think about brain health, they tend to think solely about cognition. That is, how well your senior is able to learn, how well her memory works, and how well she’s able to process information. This is a vital part of brain health, but it is only a part of brain health.
Emotional Health Is Part of Brain Health
Emotional health and well-being is a part of brain health. Your senior’s ability to understand and to formulate responses to her own emotions and the emotions of people around her comes down to how well her brain processes information. Mental health is a combination of chemical processes in the brain and body and how your senior thinks about what she’s feeling.
Motor Functions Are Controlled by the Brain
Movement, like being able to walk and having solid balance, is also a part of brain health. The brain coordinates these complex sets of movements, and if it is not doing so very well, that creates a disconnect between your senior’s muscles and limbs and her brain. That leads to big mobility issues.
Pressure, Temperature, Pain, and Touch Are a Big Part of Brain Health
Other functions, like your senior’s sense of touch and her responses to pain, pressure, and temperature all fall under tactile functions. Your senior’s brain is a crucial part of those calculations. If you hold her hand, nerves in her hand sense the different factors involved, like the temperature of your hand, the pressure of your touch, and the touch itself, and then transmit that information to the brain, where it’s all interpreted. If there’s a breakdown anywhere in the process, your elderly family member doesn’t process that touch.
Brain health is something that your senior’s doctor can help her to manage, to an extent. If your aging family member is having difficulty with brain health in ways that affect her quality of life, elderly care providers may be able to help. They can assist your senior with mobility as well as other tasks that are giving her difficulty.
If you or an aging loved-one are considering hiring Senior Care in Northbrook, IL, call the caring staff at LifeCare Home Health & In-Home Services. Call (888) 606-4199 LifeCare serves all of the Chicago Metro Area.
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