UConn Study: Talking Baseball Assists Aging Adults With Dementia | The Boneyard

UConn Study: Talking Baseball Assists Aging Adults With Dementia

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Talking Baseball Assists Aging Adults with Dementia - UConn Today

For many aging adults some of their strongest childhood memories may be linked to playing baseball, talking about games, or going to see their favorite Major League team with their father.

UConn researcher Michael Ego, professor of human development and family studies at the Stamford campus, is studying the effectiveness of using baseball as part of reminiscence therapy for aging adults now affected by dementia, the decline in age-related memory loss including Alzheimer’s Disease that also causes individuals to require assistance from a caregiver.

Earlier this year Ego, who has conducted a variety of research in gerontology and elder care, developed the Baseball Reminiscence Program with the staff of the River House Adult Care Center in Cos Cob, Connecticut. The program is based on similar activities he studied in Austin, Texas, and St. Louis, Missouri, as well as similar programs he observed during a visit to Scotland focused on soccer, golf, and cricket.

Information about the Baseball Reminiscence Programs in Connecticut, Texas, and Missouri has already started to spread around the nation. In June, Ego traveled to Cooperstown, New York, to the Annual Cooperstown Symposium on Baseball and American Culture at the Baseball Hall of Fame, where he delivered a presentation with Jim Kenton of the Austin program that included a video Ego produced about that program. Ego also spoke during the Sport, Dementia, and Mental Health symposium hosted by The Scottish Football Museum in partnership with the University of Endinburgh, a member of Universitas 21 an international network of leading research-intensive universities in 13 nations, including UConn.

Ego and Spellman also will detail the experience of the River House program during the national conference of the Adult Day Services Association of America in late September. An ESPN producer has attended several sessions, including the trip to Citi Field, conducting interviews with patients and caregivers and River House staff for a future broadcast.

Ego is preparing to conduct a formal quality of life study with River House and Austin program participants this fall to gather data from the beginning of the session to the end. The Texas program is part of the Rogers Hornsby Chapter of the Society for American Baseball Research.

“The thing that inspires me to do more to spread these programs all over the country,” Ego says, “is the smiles, laughter, and satisfaction these individuals get from sitting around talking about baseball with their peers.”
 

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