Nathan Theill

University of Zurich | UZH · URPP "Dynamics of Healthy Aging"

Background The Mini Suffering State Examination (MSSE) has been explicitly recommended to assess suffering in dementia patients. This study aimed to develop a German version of the MSSE and assess its psychometric properties involving people with advanced dementia (PAD) in a nursing home setting. Methods The MSSE was translated into German, and 95...

Background Little empirical evidence of high levels of oral diseases of people in need of care and the impact of dementia is available. The resident assessment instrument minimum data set (RAI-MDS) is an evaluation tool for caregivers.Objective The aim of this study was to show oral health of nursing home residents through RAI-MDS 2.0 data as a fun...

Background: Assisted dying and continuous deep sedation (CDS) are controversial practices. Little is known about the perceptions of physicians and surrogates about these practices for patients with advanced dementia. Objectives: To describe and compare physician and surrogate agreement with the use of assisted dying and CDS in advanced dementia....

Background: fact Boxes are decision support tools that can inform about treatment effects. Objectives: to test whether Fact Box decision support tools impacted decisional conflict, knowledge and preferences about the use of antibiotics and artificial hydration in advanced dementia. Design: randomized controlled trial. Setting: Swiss-German r...

In 10 volumes, jointly developed by relatives, practitioners, and researchers, information and guidance for relatives of persons with dementia at the end of life. 10 volumes on (1) Quality of life, (2) communication, (3) eating and drinking, (4) Health, (5) challenging behaviors, (6) spirituality, (7) legal and financial issues, (8) dying, (9) work...

Background: Research on terminal decline has widely documented that cognitive performance steeply declines with nearing death. To date, it is unclear whether these changes are normative, based on pathologies associated with (preclinical) dementia, or both. Objectives: We analyzed heterogeneity in trajectories of terminal cognitive change in Swis...

Abstract. The city of Zurich emphasizes outpatient services for people with dementia. Appropriate outpatient services should delay nursing home admission. This study measured the state of dementia at patients’ admission into two nursing homes in Zurich in the years 2009, 2010, and 2013. The scores of MMSE and CPS at the time of nursing home admissi...

Background Specific knowledge of urinary incontinence (UI) and its interrelation with physical and cognitive health is essential to working towards prevention of UI and to improving quality of treatment and care. The purpose of this study was to determine the association between UI and the activities of daily living (ADL) hierarchy scale, the cogni...

Background The proportion of older people with advanced dementia who will die in nursing homes is constantly growing. However, little is known about the dying phase, the type of symptoms, the management of symptoms and the quality of life and dying in people with advanced dementia. The ZULIDAD (Zurich Life and Death with Advanced Dementia) study ai...

Background: About one-third of people older than 65 years fall at least once a year. Physical exercise has been previously demonstrated to improve gait, enhance physical fitness, and prevent falls. Nonetheless, the addition of cognitive training components may potentially increase these effects, since cognitive impairment is related to gait irregul...

Background: Cognitive impairment is a health problem that concerns almost every second elderly person. Physical and cognitive training have differential positive effects on cognition, but have been rarely applied in combination. This study evaluates synergistic effects of mul- ticomponent physical exercise complemented with novel simultaneous cogni...

In adults, reporting low and high maternal care in childhood, we compared DNA methylation in two stress-associated genes (two target sequences in the oxytocin receptor gene, OXTR; one in the brain-derived neurotrophic factor gene, BDNF) in peripheral whole blood, in a cross-sectional study (University of Basel, Switzerland) during 2007-2008. We rec...

Background: Age-related cognitive decline is often associated with unsafe driving behavior. We hypothesized that 10 active training sessions in a driving simulator increase cognitive and on-road driving performance. In addition, driving simulator training should outperform cognitive training. Methods: Ninety-one healthy active drivers (62–87 years)...

While many studies confirm the positive effect of cognitive and physical training on cognitive performance of older adults, only little is known about the effects of simultaneously performed cognitive and physical training. In the current study, older adults simultaneously performed a verbal working memory and a cardiovascular training to improve c...

Gerontopsychology explores the effects of ageing on the brain and on personality. It explores how cognitive functions change with ageing and how individuals can cope with such change in order to maintain a high quality of life. An important age-related cognitive change is dementia, which is a disease that causes people to lose their memory and thei...

In industrialized countries the share of elderly subjects is in- creasing. Hence, diseases or symptoms associated with aging are more common than they were in the past. As a consequence, more effort is invested into research analyzing the effects of aging on the motion and cognition. However, economical and flexible methods to measure motion and it...

To investigate dual-task performance of gait and cognition in cognitively healthy and cognitively impaired older adults using a motor-cognition dual-task paradigm. Cross-sectional retrospective study. The Basel Memory Clinic and the Basel Study on the Elderly (Project BASEL). Seven hundred eleven older adults (mean age 77.2±6.2, 350 (49.2%) female...