地域の高齢者を支える介護福祉教育の充実を目指して

Students studying to become care workers need to understand the current state of senior citizens who live in their region through continuous volunteer participation. Locally situated courses are desirable for these volunteer experiences.As a result, the students did not take a limited view on the elderly as simply needing care, but took a broader view and treated the elderly as ordinary citizens. They were able to discover why healthy elderly people came to need care, what could be done to prevent the need for care, and how to relate to them in concrete terms so as to provide solutions to their problems.This demonstrates that, in order to enhance care services education in the future, we must offer appropriate support for not only in-school education and specialized intensive care giving, but also for light- to mid-level in-home elderly care, establishing a broad range of opportunities to learn about social welfare

Ultra-Early Combination Antiplatelet Therapy with Cilostazol for the Prevention of Branch Atheromatous Disease: A Multicenter Prospective Study

Background and Purpose: The optimal use of antiplatelet therapy for intracranial branch atheromatous disease (BAD) is not known. Methods: We conducted a prospective multicenter, single-group trial of 144 consecutive patients diagnosed with probable BAD. All patients were treated within 12 h of symptom onset to prevent clinical progression using dual antiplatelet therapy with cilostazol plus one oral antiplatelet drug (aspirin or clopidogrel). Endpoints of progressive BAD in the dual therapy group at 2 weeks were compared with a matched historical control group of 142 patients treated with single oral antiplatelet therapy using either cilostazol, aspirin, or clopidogrel. Results: Progressive motor paresis occurred in 14 patients (9.7%) in the aggressive antiplatelet group, compared with 48 (33.8%) in the matched single antiplatelet group. Multivariate logistic regression analysis revealed the following variables to be associated with a better prognosis for BAD: baseline modified Rankin Scale score, dual oral antiplatelet therapy with cilostazol, and dyslipidemia (odds ratios of 0.616, 0.445, and 0.297, respectively). Hypertension was associated with a worse prognosis for BAD (odds ratio of 1.955). Conclusions: Our trial showed that clinical progression of BAD was significantly reduced with the administration of ultra-early aggressive combination therapy using cilostazol compared to treatment with antiplatelet monotherapy