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.
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