Older people are living longer than before, but are they living healthier?

Ruby Yu is a research assistant professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK), specialising in gerontology and geriatrics. She is also a research fellow at the CUHK Jockey Club Institute of Ageing. Her recent paper Trajectories of frailty among Chinese older people in Hong Kong between 2001 and 2012: An Age-period-cohort Analysis was published today in Age and Ageing journal.

There is no doubt that people from countries all over of the world are living longer, but there is little evidence to suggest that older people today are living healthier than their predecessors did at the same age. This is a major cause of concern for many governments around the world because if the added years of people today are dominated by chronic diseases and functional disabilities, there will be negative implications (e.g., extended treatment for older people which increases the health and social care cost to society).

Global Summit on Aging and Health- personal reflections on a conference and a cultural exchange

Dr Eileen Burns has been a geriatrician in Leeds since 1992 and is President of the BGS. She is currently Clinical Lead for integration in Leeds and Chairman of the BGS Community Geriatrics Special Interest Group. She tweets @EileenBurns13

I was fortunate enough to attend and speak at a Global Summit on Aging held in Shanghai recently. It was a fascinating event, with speakers from an enormous variety of backgrounds- from the US Embassy in Beijing, the World Health Organisation, and the United Nations Population Fund, as well as numerous Chinese Government office holders.

The summit was jointly organised by Columbia University, USA (under the auspices of the wonderful Professor Linda Fried) and Fudan University in China.

Translating Isaacs

Professor Kenneth Rockwood has published more than 300 peer-reviewed scientific publications and seven books, including the seventh edition of the Brocklehurst’s Textbook of Geriatric Medicine & Gerontology. He is the Kathryn Allen Weldon Professor of Alzheimer research at Dalhousie University, and a staff internist and geriatrician at the Capital District Health Authority in Halifax in Canada. 

In May 2016 I was honoured to speak about frailty at the Chinese National Geriatrics Conference in Beijing. The audience, not just geriatricians, was people who care for frail older adults. They recognized in geriatric medicine the tools and concepts needed to improve the care of those patients.

For that reason I found myself discussing how best to translate the great Bernard Isaacs’ nicely alliterative phrase “Geriatric Giants. In The Challenge of Geriatric Medicine (Oxford: OUP, 1980) Isaacs elaborates them, also alliteratively, as “instability, immobility, incontinence, intellectual impairment/memory and impaired independence”. These were key ways in which patients and their families understood that “something was wrong”.

Chinese Geriatric Medicine

Prof Kenneth Rockwood is Director of Geriatric Medicine Research at Dalhousie University, Canada, adjunct Professor of Geriatric Medicine at the University of Manchester and serves on the International Advisory Panel of Age and Ageing journal. 

The Chinese Geriatrics Society met on May 24 2014, brought together for the 7^th National Conference on Prevention and Control of Common Diseases in Elderly People. As a speaker and honorary conference co-chair, I’ve been able to see some of the workings up close.  Geriatrics transcends many aspects of culture, so that much would be familiar to any BGS meeting attendee – and not just the apparently universal audiovisual glitches (I did not go unspared).