People with obesity or abnormal health have six times the risk of getting dementia 20 years later, a European expert on the medicine of aging said in Taipei on Wednesday.
Jean-Pierre Michel, cofounder of the European Academy of Medicine of Aging and former president of the EU Geriatric Medicine Society, said that parents should teach their children about a healthy diet and to avoid smoking.
Healthy aging is not only having no illnesses, but maintaining a good quality of life and functional capacity, Michel told a Taipei forum on the medicine of aging.
Doctors, nurses and social workers should learn the medicine of aging and cooperate with each other to ensure that the elderly can enjoy healthy twilight years, he said.
Japanese academic Takao Suzuki said at the forum that preventative measures are the key for people aged between 65 and 74, in the early stages of old age, because symptoms of feeling feeble or frail are forks in the road between health and illness.
According to statistics, feeble or frail elderly people are nearly five times more likely to become disabled than their healthier counterparts, the former head of the research institute at Japan’s National Center for Geriatrics and Gerontology said.
Arranging for elderly people to participate in cooking courses, while letting them live in an environment with a healthy diet, good exercise and social activities, can prevent or delay the symptoms of feebleness or diseases that afflict the elderly, Suzuki said.
Elderly people’s psychological capacity can decline more severely than their physical ability, so healthcare professionals should also pay attention to their psychological health, Taipei Veterans General Hospital Center for Geriatrics and Gerontology director Chen Liang-kung (陳亮恭) said.
According to statistics, of the 150,000 people who die in the world each day, two-thirds die of chronic disease, which shows that helping old people to coexist with chronic disease is important in today’s aging society, Chen said.
Since the immune system weakens with age, contagious diseases become a significant issue for older people, Chen said.
Taiwan became an aging society — defined as people aged 65 or older accounting for at least 7 percent of the population — in 1993. It is likely to become an aged society (14 percent) in 2018 and a super-aged society (20 percent) in 2025, according to a 2014 report by the National Development Council.
The elderly would make up 43.2 percent of the population by 2061, the report said.
The nation’s dependency ratio — the ratio of those under the age of 15 and over the age of 64 compared with those of working age — would rise to 0.99:1 in 2061, from 0.35:1 in 2014, the report said.
Former president Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) mention of Taiwan’s official name during a meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) on Wednesday was likely a deliberate political play, academics said. “As I see it, it was intentional,” National Chengchi University Graduate Institute of East Asian Studies professor Wang Hsin-hsien (王信賢) said of Ma’s initial use of the “Republic of China” (ROC) to refer to the wider concept of “the Chinese nation.” Ma quickly corrected himself, and his office later described his use of the two similar-sounding yet politically distinct terms as “purely a gaffe.” Given Ma was reading from a script, the supposed slipup
Former Czech Republic-based Taiwanese researcher Cheng Yu-chin (鄭宇欽) has been sentenced to seven years in prison on espionage-related charges, China’s Ministry of State Security announced yesterday. China said Cheng was a spy for Taiwan who “masqueraded as a professor” and that he was previously an assistant to former Cabinet secretary-general Cho Jung-tai (卓榮泰). President-elect William Lai (賴清德) on Wednesday last week announced Cho would be his premier when Lai is inaugurated next month. Today is China’s “National Security Education Day.” The Chinese ministry yesterday released a video online showing arrests over the past 10 years of people alleged to be
THE HAWAII FACTOR: While a 1965 opinion said an attack on Hawaii would not trigger Article 5, the text of the treaty suggests the state is covered, the report says NATO could be drawn into a conflict in the Taiwan Strait if Chinese forces attacked the US mainland or Hawaii, a NATO Defense College report published on Monday says. The report, written by James Lee, an assistant research fellow at Academia Sinica’s Institute of European and American Studies, states that under certain conditions a Taiwan contingency could trigger Article 5 of NATO, under which an attack against any member of the alliance is considered an attack against all members, necessitating a response. Article 6 of the North Atlantic Treaty specifies that an armed attack in the territory of any member in Europe,
The bodies of two individuals were recovered and three additional bodies were discovered on the Shakadang Trail (砂卡礑) in Taroko National Park, eight days after the devastating earthquake in Hualien County, search-and-rescue personnel said. The rescuers reported that they retrieved the bodies of a man and a girl, suspected to be the father and daughter from the Yu (游) family, 500m from the entrance of the trail on Wednesday. The rescue team added that despite the discovery of the two bodies on Friday last week, they had been unable to retrieve them until Wednesday due to the heavy equipment needed to lift