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Boulder County Youth Corps now accepting applications
Jan 31st
Boulder County, Colo. – The Boulder County Youth Corps is now accepting applications for summer jobs from residents ages 14-17 and from adults for team leader positions. Boulder County is especially in need of female corps members and leaders.
The deadline to submit youth applications is Friday, March 25. Other positions are open until filled.
The Youth Corps will hire up to 165 teenagers to work 30 hours per week, Monday through Thursday, from June 13 to Aug. 3 on a variety of community service projects. Team leaders will be employed from May 31 to Aug. 5 to work up to 40 hours per week, Monday through Friday. Projects include activities such as forest thinning, trail building, fence construction, historic restoration and landscaping. Youth Corps teams work in unincorporated Boulder County as well as in Lafayette, Longmont and Superior.
Applications are available online at www.BoulderCounty.org/YouthCorps. Applications can also be picked up at counseling offices in Boulder Valley and St. Vrain Valley schools; city and town personnel offices; most local recreation and youth centers and libraries; and the county human resources department at 2025 14th St. in Boulder.
This year, corps members will earn a starting wage of $7.36 per hour, with the possibility of earning a $100 bonus at the end of the program based on merit and strong attendance. Teens who have worked for the corps in past years can earn up to $7.86 per hour. In addition, corps members are eligible for reimbursement for the purchase of work boots and gloves. RTD bus passes for the purpose of traveling to and from centralized work meeting places may be subsidized.
Team leaders must be high school graduates and at least 21 years old with two years or more of college coursework. Assistant team leaders must be high school graduates and at least 18 years old, among other qualifications. A list of full qualifications is available online at www.BoulderCounty.org/YouthCorps. Team leaders start at $13 per hour and Assistant team leaders at $11 per hour.
The Youth Corps offers one of the best first-job opportunities available in Boulder County. Teams have completed projects such as building the new Benjamin Loop Trail at Betasso Preserve and building picnic table pads on open space. Other projects have included historic restoration of buildings, construction and repair of fencing, trail maintenance, removal of Russian olive trees and noxious weeds, replacing light bulbs with compact fluorescents, landscaping and forest thinning projects.
For more information, visit www.BoulderCounty.org/YouthCorps or contact Youth Corps program manager Judy Wolfe at jwolfe@bouldercounty.org or 303-678-6104.
-BoulderCounty
OLDER ADULTS TAKING POPULAR SLEEP MEDICINE AT RISK FOR FALLS AND COGNITIVE IMPAIRMENT, STUDY FINDS
Jan 13th
The study, which involved 25 healthy adults, showed 58 percent of the older adults and 27 percent of the young adults who took a hypnotic, sleep-inducing drug called zolpidem showed a significant loss of balance when awakened two hours after sleep. The findings are important because falls are the leading cause of injury in older adults, and 30 percent of adults 65 and older who fall require hospitalization each year, said CU-Boulder Associate Professor Kenneth Wright, lead study author.
To measure balance, the research team used a technique known as a “tandem walk” in which subjects place one foot in front of the other with a normal step length on a 16-foot-long, six-inch-wide beam on the floor. In 10 previous practice trials with no medication, none of the 25 participants stepped off the beam, indicating no loss of balance. All participants were provided with stabilizing assistance to prevent falls during the trials, he said.
“The balance impairments of older adults taking zolpidem were clinically significant and the cognitive impairments were more than twice as large compared to the same older adults taking placebos,” said Wright, a faculty member in the integrative physiology department. “This suggests to us that sleep medication produces significant safety risks.”
The new CU-Boulder study is the first to measure both the walking stability and cognition of subjects taking hypnotic sleep medicines or placebos. In addition to the balance problems caused by zolpidem, the study also showed that waking up after two hours of sleep after taking zolpidem enhances sleep inertia, or grogginess, a state that temporarily impairs working memory. The study participants were given computerized performance tests that involved adding randomly generated numbers.
A paper on the subject was published Jan. 13 in the Journal of the American Geriatric Society. Co-authors included CU-Boulder’s Daniel Frey, Justus Ortega, Courtney Wiseman and Claire Farley. The study was funded primarily by the National Institutes of Health.
The effects of sleep inertia even without sleep medication has previously been shown to cause cognitive impairment, said Wright. But when the CU-Boulder study subjects took zolpidem rather than a placebo, the cognitive impairments essentially doubled.
One unexpected study finding was that young people taking placebos appear to be more cognitively impacted by sleep inertia than older adults taking placebos, he said.
A 2006 study led by Wright showed that study subjects who took no sleep medicine and were awakened after eight hours of sleep were more cognitively impaired, for a short period of time, than a totally sleep deprived person.
Several billion doses of zolpidem have been prescribed worldwide, said Wright, who also directs CU-Boulder’s Sleep and Chronobiology Laboratory. Zolpidem is a generic drug that is marketed under a number of different brand names, including Ambien, Zolpimist, Edluar, Hypogen, Somidem and Ivedal.
The CU-Boulder team also measured balance and cognition in older adults who took no sleep medication and were kept awake for two hours past their normal bedtime. They found that 25 percent of these older adults failed the tandem walking balance test, which is consistent with what is seen in people who have insomnia. “Just having insomnia itself increases your risk of falls, even without sleep medication,” he said.
The finding that zolpidem affected older adults more than younger adults in balance tests may be explained in part by the fact that both groups were given five milligram doses on study nights. While the normal dose for older adults is five milligrams, the standard dosage for younger adults being treated for insomnia is 10 milligrams. “This is an area that needs more study,” he said.
The study results showing that both hypnotic sleep medications and sleep inertia cause significant impairment have important public health implications, said Wright. In older adults, falls have caused millions of nonfatal injuries annually and more than 300,000 fatalities worldwide. “Falls can be very debilitating, especially when older people break their hips and require hospitalization, causing their quality of life to go down,” said Wright.
In addition, the cognitive impairments caused by both zolpidem and sleep inertia may impact decision-making, including responding to situations like fire alarms and medical emergencies as well as caring for sick children or driving to a clinic or hospital, said Wright.
“One of the goals of this study was to understand the risk of this sleep medication and of sleep inertia on human safety and cognition and to educate adults and health care workers about potential problems,” said Wright. “We are not suggesting that sleep medications should not be used, because they have their place in terms of the treatment of insomnia.”
One possible solution to reducing falls of older people due to zolpidem, other sleep medications or sleep inertia would be to install bedside commodes for those who frequently wake up in the night to void themselves, said Wright. Additional research is needed on this important public health and safety topic, he said.
Source: CU-Boulder news release