Abstract
Older adults experience more chronic illnesses than any other age group and thus are frequently exposed to several types of medical information, including treatment recommendations, medical advertisements, and instructions for using medications and home medical devices. The present chapter considers how older patients acquire and use medical information across a wide range of real-world contexts. Of particular interest is how older patients comprehend and remember complex dietary and drug regimens as well as medical claims and instructions for use of medical technologies, despite facing numerous challenges (i.e., sensory, cognitive, biomedical, and psychosocial) in processing this information. A more complete understanding of how older adults process health information should result in greater treatment compliance, better informed decisions, and lower health care costs through reduced hospitalizations. In this chapter, I first provide an overview of age-related sensory and cognitive changes that may affect older adults' ability to learn medical information. This is followed by a summary of key findings on aging and medical information processing, including the roles of age and prior knowledge in learning new health information and suggestions for overcoming older patients' inaccurate health beliefs. Next, I examine how medical conditions and medical treatments may themselves affect older patients' learning of medical information. This is followed by an examination of psychosocial issues in older patient-provider interactions, including the roles that the older patient, health care provider, and third parties play in the transmission of information during the medical encounter. Finally, I conclude by suggesting ways in which health care providers, policymakers, and designers of medical devices and Web sites might improve their delivery of health information to older adults. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2009 APA, all rights reserved)