Spring Speakers Series: Asthma in the older patient

Dominick Shaw is an Associate Professor and honorary clinician at the University of Nottingham and Nottingham University NHS Hospital Trust. He leads the commissioned severe asthma service and performs clinical studies in asthma. He will be speaking at the upcoming BGS Spring Meeting in Nottingham.

Asthma still presents a major challenge to society. Although classically regarded as a disease of children and young adults, accumulating evidence suggests that late onset asthma carries a poorer prognosis. Moreover although the death rate from asthma has fallen over the last 10-15 years in people under 75, in those aged over 75 it has doubled. Consequently the overall mortality rate has not changed.

Asthma still causes significant social and financial problems for patients, with recurrent exacerbations needing oral steroids, hospital admissions, time off work and impact on families and carers. There is light at the end of the asthma tunnel however and asthma has advanced a long way from, in the words of a geriatrician colleague*, “one puff of the blue, two of the brown”.

Chronic disease begins in childhood

A conference report from the BGS Spring Meeting in Belfast, by Liz Gill.

Research is increasingly suggesting that old age is influenced by conditions and events in early life, a concept supported by data from The Irish Longitudinal Study on Ageing, TILDA, which has studied 8,500 people aged 50 and over for the past ten years. Opening a special session on the last morning of the conference, its principal investigator Prof Rose-Anne Kenny of Trinity College Dublin, described the process. Participants were given an initial comprehensive assessment which included physical health, cognition, psychology, behaviour, family background and use of health care. They were then revisited every two years providing a rich set of data involving almost one in every 140 people in Ireland.