Healthy Aging For Older Adults


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The United States is on the brink of a longevity revolution. By 2030, the number of older Americans will have more than doubled to 70 million, or one in every five Americans. The growing number and proportion of older adults places increasing demands on the public health system and on medical and social services.

Chronic diseases exact a particularly heavy health and economic burden on older adults due to associated long-term illness, diminished quality of life, and greatly increased health care costs. Although the risk of disease and disability clearly increases with advancing age, poor health is not an inevitable consequence of aging.

Much of the illness, disability, and death associated with chronic disease is avoidable through known prevention measures. Key measures include practicing a healthy lifestyle (e.g., regular physical activity, healthy eating, and avoiding tobacco use) and the use of early detection practices (e.g., screening for breast, cervical, and colorectal cancers, diabetes and its complications, and depression).

Critical knowledge gaps exist for responding to the health needs of older adults. For chronic diseases and conditions such as Alzheimer's disease, arthritis, depression, psychiatric disorders, osteoporosis, Parkinson's disease, and urinary incontinence, much remains to be learned about their distribution in the population, associated risk factors, and effective measures to prevent or delay their onset.

Copyright © Neil Harper
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Superbugs ‘are all over– not just in hospitals’

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Sep 27 2007

Western Mail

POTENTIALLY fatal superbugs are not confined to hospitals but are now invading homes, schools and gyms, scientists claimed last night. A report in New Scientist says the infections are now lurking “just about everywhere”. Robert Daum, a paediatrician at the University of Chicago’s Children’s Hospital was one of the first to warn of “community MRSA” in 1998. He told New Scientist, “Everywhere it has come it has stayed and it comes to more and more places every day.” It is thought young people, gym users and those involved in contact sports or living in close proximity – such as in prison – are the most vulnerable to the infections. Community MRSA is not thought to be simply an escapee from hospitals because it has certain distinguishing features and is actually more virulent. It is however usually susceptible to certain antibiotics that no longer work on hospital MRSA, although experts believe this could soon change. Robert Skov, head of the Danish Centre for Antimicrobials and Infection Control in Copenhagen, told the journal, “Once these community strains get into hospitals, I would be surprised if they don’t pick up more resistance determinants.” Hospitals in Wales and England are already advised to screen people scheduled to undergo certain types of surgery for superbugs. But some doctors now want all patients, and possibly even people just visiting emergency rooms, to be screened for the infections as well. Richard James, director of the centre for Healthcare Associated Infections in Nottingham, said this would save hospitals money in the long term. But Dr Daum believes the infections are already too widespread in the US for screening to have any effect. In Scandinavia, the battle against MRSA has already been taken to the community in a bid to halt the infection spreading, with nurses sent to people’s homes to treat carriers and educate them about hygiene. Dr Skov said, “Every case of MRSA, regardless of whether it causes infection or is just colonisation, is a transmission possibility. That means we should fight MRSA in the community too. If you don’t then you will have a silent pool who are continuously spreading it to other people.” Doctors also fear the increasing invulnerability of these superbug bacteria could put medicine back to how it was before the advent of antibiotics. This regression would mean humans once again becoming defenceless against common illnesses such as pneumonia, according to the article.

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