July 2017 issue of Age and Ageing journal is out now

The July 2017 issue of Age and Ageing, the journal of the British Geriatrics Society is out now.  A full table of contents is available here, with editorials, research papers, reviews, short reports, case reports book reviews and more.

Hot topics in this issue include:

Care home leadership

Physical restraint

Diet and muscle function

Prescribing for frail older
adults

Treatment of overactive
bladder

The Editor’s View article gives an overview of the issue with a summary of highlights. This article is free to read and can be viewed here.

Frequent consumption of fruit and vegetables inversely associated with sarcopenia

Yunhwan Lee is a professor and Jinhee Kim is a research fellow in the Department of Preventive Medicine and Public Health of Ajou University School of Medicine, and the Institute on Aging of Ajou University Medical Center in the Republic of Korea. His paper was recently published in Age and Ageing journal.

Sarcopenia, the gradual loss of muscle mass with age, is now widely recognised as a major health problem in late life. Older people with sarcopenia are prone to suffering from frailty, falls, and disability that negatively affects their quality of life. Because there is currently no effective treatment for sarcopenia, it is important to identify risk factors that have a modifiable influence on the condition.

They might be drawing their pension but they’re not sitting around – retired people are less sedentary than those who work

Alan Godfrey is a Research Associate at the Institute for Ageing and Health, Newcastle, and for the LiveWell Programme to promote improved health and well-being in later life. They tweet at: @LiveWellUK

A recent study from the Institute of Ageing and Health (IAH) at Newcastle University has suggested that retirement may have a positive effect on time spent being active (walking). To date, little is known about the effects of retirement and age on this form of physical activity as previous research has relied on diaries or estimates of activity (from self-reported time spent inactive) during a person’s daily/weekly schedule.

The current study, led by Dr. Alan Godfrey and recently published in the journal Age and Ageing, studied the ambulatory and sedentary (time spent sitting/lying) behaviours of 98 older adults (48-89 years) from the cohort of healthy adults recruited as part of the ICICLE Gait study headed by Professor Lynn Rochester at IAH.

Practical Guidance to Help Identify and Combat Malnutrition in Frail Older People

Prof Paul Knight is President of the BGS and is Director of Medical Education and Consultant Physician at the Royal Infirmary, Glasgow.

The issue of malnutrition has been brought into sharp focus by the Francis report, where harrowing witness accounts highlighted how patients suffer when patient nutrition and assistance with feeding is not given adequate priority.  However, as geriatricians, we have long recognised the importance that adequate intake of food and fluid plays in gold-standard patient care.