Age and ageing
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it has been observed that a frailty index (FI) is limited by the value of 0.7. Whether this holds in countries with higher mortality rates is not known. ⋯ a limit to frailty occurred with FI = 0.7 which was not exceeded at any age or in any wave. There appears to be a demonstrable limit to the number of health problems that people can tolerate.
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Review Historical Article
The war against dementia: are we battle weary yet?
Recently, the use of military metaphors when discussing dementia and in particular Alzheimer's disease has increased, both in medical literature and mainstream media. While military metaphors are a recent adoption when used to describe dementia, in oncology there has been longstanding debate about the usefulness of such metaphors. This article reviews the history of military metaphors in medicine, literature discussing their use, and considers their use in describing dementia. While military metaphors are widely used in medicine, consideration should be taken in their use as they have the potential to influence the way we and our patients conceptualise and experience illness and treatment.
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to investigate the prevalence and risk factors of diabetes to dementia and its subtypes such as Alzheimer disease (AD) and vascular dementia (VD) among the Chinese elderly population. ⋯ the present study shows that T2DM is associated with dementia and its subtypes amongst elderly people in the Chinese population.
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Review Practice Guideline
Guidance on the management of pain in older people.
This guidance document reviews the epidemiology and management of pain in older people via a literature review of published research. The aim of this document is to inform health professionals in any care setting who work with older adults on best practice for the management of pain and to identify where there are gaps in the evidence that require further research. The assessment of pain in older people has not been covered within this guidance and can be found in a separate document (http://www.britishpainsociety.org/pub_professional.htm#assessmentpop). ⋯ There is also some evidence supporting the use of cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) among nursing home populations, but of course these approaches require training and time. There are many areas that require further research, including pharmacological management where approaches are often tested in younger populations and then translated across. Prevalence studies need consistency in terms of age, diagnosis and terminology, and further work needs to be done on evaluating non-pharmacological approaches.
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sarcopenia has been indicated as a reliable marker of frailty and poor prognosis among the oldest individuals. We evaluated the impact of sarcopenia on the risk of all-cause death in a population of frail older persons living in community. ⋯ our results obtained from a representative sample of very old and frail subjects show that sarcopenia is associated with mortality, independently of age and other clinical and functional variables.