Dr Catherine Pennington is a Senior Clinical Research Fellow at the Centre for Dementia Prevention, University of Edinburgh, and honorary Clinical Lecturer at the University of Bristol ReMemBr Group. In the accompanying article she reviews different tools for assessing decision making capacity in people with dementia.
Dementia is one of the greatest health challenges of our time. People with dementia experience changes to their ability to understand, evaluate and retain information, and may have problems expressing and remembering their decisions. These changes all affect whether or not someone has the mental capacity to make their own decisions, but we should not automatically assume that dementia equals a loss of capacity. Many people with mild or moderate dementia will still have the ability to make informed choices, particularly when information is given in an appropriate format. This could mean simplifying the language used, repeating information, and using clearly written, short documents.
I am now coming toward the end of my 5 year tenure as Editor-in-Chief of Age and Ageing, having taken over this role from Roger Francis in February 2014.
This report adds to the growing body of evidence linking CVD risk factors with an increased risk of frailty.
Pain is a very common condition in older people, ranging from 40% in community-dwelling older adults to 80% in institutionalised individuals. It is known that pain, especially persistent pain (defined as a painful experience that continues for a prolonged period of time that may or may not be associated with a recognisable disease process), is associated with depression, social isolation, anxiety, insomnia, falls, higher health costs, weight loss, greater vulnerability to stressors and functional loss in older people. 
Yoga-based exercise offers a safe and accessible way to improve health-related quality of life and mental well-being for people over 60. Evidence for a moderate benefit of yoga in later life now extends beyond improved balance and flexibility.
Despite the rapid gain in life expectancy in the last century, it is not clear if the added years consist of healthy years or years lived in poor health and disability.
Most doctors involved in the care of older people would claim to know a frail patient when they see one. Being able to detect this frailty is crucial to ensure that treatment is appropriate, proportionate and likely to produce positive outcomes wherever possible. The measurement of frailty has become important recently with the inclusion of frailty within the requirements of an assessment in general practice, and tools to assist doctors in emergency departments evaluate frailty quickly. The most popular method for these investigations has been the frailty index, where diseases and impairments are added all together to give a score. The relationship between this frailty index and mortality has been seen across the world, giving rise to suggestions that it is one measure that is consistent across time and place. 
Fall related injuries in older people constitute a significant public health issue in Australia and internationally. Falling represents the leading cause of unintentional injury in this population with approximately one third of older adults falling each year. Effective management of falls in older populations has proven to be challenging. Despite the substantial focus on falls prevention by the Australian government over the last decade the age standardised hospital admission rates attributed to falls continue to increase. The complexity of managing falls risk in the diverse populations found within Australia, coupled with an ageing population and finite resources, drives the need to better understand factors that can influence falling from the perspective of the older person. 
With increasing age, blood pressure rises as a consequence of arterial stiffness. It has been debated whether or not to it is beneficial to treat hypertension in old age, especially in >75-year-olds when they have multimorbidity, polypharmacy or frailty. Large hypertension trials showed that lowering blood pressure in over 60-year-olds is beneficial and lowers the risk for myocardial infarction, stroke and all-cause mortality, even in >80-year-olds. However, these trials lack generalizability and typically excluded patients with multimorbidity and frailty. At the same time, observational studies raise concerns about lowering blood pressure too much, since there are several cohort studies showing a reverse association between low blood pressure and increased mortality and accelerated cognitive decline starting from age >75-year-olds. 
British Geriatrics Society 