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With Age Comes Resilience, Storm's Aftermath Proves
By Blaine Harden, Washington Post
USA
September 14, 2005
As captured by searing images on television, Hurricane Katrina seemed to single out the elderly for particular punishment -- people such as 86-year-old Pearline Chambers.
She spent two days alone in her one-story house in the submerged Ninth Ward of New Orleans, with hurricane floodwater up to her neck. She lost her false teeth, her wig and her cats.
"I just waded around and waded around, trying to get up in my attic," said Chambers, a widow. "I kept climbing and slipping and falling in that water."
After she was rescued -- two men floating by on a board heard her screams -- she spent two more semiconscious days in the city, struggling to walk, severely dehydrated and hungry. As she recalled, "I didn't know where I was. I laid somewhere, I'm not sure where, and people walked around me."
Two weeks after the storm, though, Chambers feels fine. Living now with her sister's family in this small town in northern Louisiana, she said she has nobody but "my stubborn self" to blame for ignoring hurricane warnings and refusing to flee New Orleans in her blue Chevrolet Corsica.
Her rapid recovery and emotional balance do not surprise experts who study the elderly. A large and growing body of research shows that healthy elderly people are often able to bounce back from extraordinary adversity more quickly than younger people.
"Study after study has shown that for older people, negative emotions have less of an effect than with young people -- and for the elderly those effects dissipate faster," said Gene D. Cohen, a geriatric psychiatrist at George Washington University who for 20 years directed research on aging at the National Institutes of Health.
Research on the resilience of the elderly squares with the impressions of half a dozen psychiatrists, psychologists and social workers who in the past two weeks have treated several hundred elderly people displaced by Hurricane Katrina. They agreed that when elderly evacuees were given water, food, clothes and a secure place to sleep, they tended to be less anxious and had higher morale than younger adults. This was especially true, they said, if elderly people were reunited with family.
"You don't live to 80 without being tough," said Robert E. Reichlin, a clinical psychologist and specialist on early onset Alzheimer's disease at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston. He treated elderly evacuees at the Astrodome. "Older adults do bounce back well because they have seen a lot and they have lived through a lot. Psychologically, they can take a lot more in stride than young people."
There is, however, an important medical caveat to the toughness of the elderly, Reichlin said.
"Physically, they are much less resilient than the young," he said. "When they are maxed out by an event like Hurricane Katrina -- dehydrated, malnourished and exhausted -- they often show signs of something that looks like dementia, which is sometimes called 'acute confusion syndrome.' That confusion -- the glazed and lost look that many Americans saw in the televised images of elderly evacuees from New Orleans -- usually goes away in a day or two with rest and nutrition, Reichlin said, assuming they do not have a preexisting medical problem, such as Alzheimer's.
When 24 elderly and middle-age evacuees arrived by van at the psychiatric center of the American Legion Hospital in Rayne, La., one of the elderly people was immediately diagnosed with Alzheimer's, according Charles E. Bramlet Jr., a psychiatrist who runs the center.
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