Screening, medication reviews and talking to your clinician.
Preventive Care
Prescriptions accumulate over decades and are almost never subtracted. By the mid-seventies, the drugs themselves have become one of the commoner causes of hospital admission.
Preventive Care
Screening has an intuitive logic — find it early, treat it early — that holds for some conditions and quietly fails for others. Age changes the arithmetic in both directions.
Preventive Care
A T-score of −2.4 sounds alarming and a fracture risk of 8 per cent sounds reassuring, and they can describe the same person. Here is how to read the numbers you are given.
Preventive Care
The average person waits around a decade between noticing hearing difficulty and doing something about it. That delay is not neutral — the auditory system reorganises in the meantime.
Preventive Care
Immune function declines with age, which makes vaccination both more necessary and less effective. Several vaccines are specifically formulated to compensate, and most people are not offered them by name.
Preventive Care
Most new marks that appear on older skin are entirely benign, and a few are not. The distinguishing features are learnable, and the commonest skin cancer rarely looks like what people expect.
Preventive Care
One-year mortality after a hip fracture is comparable to several common cancers. Most of what determines the outcome is decided in the first 48 hours and in the months of rehabilitation afterwards.
Preventive Care
It affects a large minority of older women and a substantial number of men, it drives falls, isolation and care home admission, and the average patient waits years before raising it.
Preventive Care
One is reversible with a twenty-minute operation, one is treatable if caught early, and one steals peripheral vision so gradually that most people do not notice until a third of it has gone.
Preventive Care
Painful feet change how you walk, which changes your balance, which changes your falls risk. Reduced flexibility and eyesight mean many people over 70 cannot properly inspect their own feet.
Preventive Care
It is the most common gastrointestinal complaint in older adults, a frequent cause of hospital admission, and one of the more common reasons a person with dementia becomes suddenly agitated.
Preventive Care
A hospital is where you go to be treated and also where older people lose the ability to walk, become confused, acquire new medications and lose old ones. Some of that is avoidable.
Preventive Care
The rash is the visible part and the least important. What determines how bad an episode is turns out to be how quickly antiviral treatment starts and how old you are.
