scholarly journals Living to 100 years and beyond: Drivers and implications

European View ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 17 (1) ◽  
pp. 44-51
Author(s):  
George W. Leeson

The world is ageing, both at an individual and a population level, and population ageing is truly a global phenomenon. The emergence of large numbers of centenarians has accompanied this development and the twenty-first century promises to be the century of centenarians. The number of centenarians in Europe increased from around 57,000 in 2006 to almost 90,000 in 2011. By 2100 the number is expected to reach around 1.4 million in England and Wales alone. This century of centenarians will be challenging in both the developed and the emerging economies. The trend has fundamental consequences for the way in which individuals view and live these ever-extending lives, but also for the way in which societal infrastructures (education, workplaces, housing, transport, and health and social care) will need to be adapted to the needs of extreme-aged populations. More importantly, perhaps, our perception of old age needs a dramatic reappraisal.

2003 ◽  
Vol 66 (3) ◽  
pp. 472-485 ◽  
Author(s):  
CATHERINE HALL

This article uses the World Anti-Slavery Convention of 1840, and the way in which it was represented in Benjamin Robert Haydon's painting of it, to reflect on the ways in which Britons thought of themselves as an ’imperial people’, ’lords of humankind’, fit to rule over others. The Whig reforms of the 1830s had brought the enfranchisement of large numbers of middle-class men, and the emancipation of the enslaved across the British Empire. Excavating the assumptions of the abolitionists who gathered at the Convention allows us to see how new hierarchies of difference were encoded by 1840, placing freed black men, middle-class women and Irish Catholics on the margins of the new body politic.


2018 ◽  
Vol 15 (3) ◽  
pp. 49-51 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nick Bouras ◽  
Silvia Davey ◽  
Tracey Power ◽  
Jonathan Rolfe ◽  
Tom Craig ◽  
...  

Maudsley International was set up to help improve people's mental health and well-being around the world. A variety of programmes have been developed by Maudsley International over the past 10 years, for planning and implementing services; building capacity; and training and evaluation to support organisations and individuals, professionals and managers to train and develop health and social care provisions. Maudsley International's model is based on collaboration, sharing expertise and cultural understanding with international partners.


2008 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 2-6 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gwyneth Lewis

Every year some eight million women suffer preventable or remediable pregnancy-related complications and over half a million will die unnecessarily. Most of these deaths could be averted at little or no extra cost, even where resources are limited, but in order to take action, and develop and implement changes to maternity services to save mothers and newborns lives, a change in cultural attitudes and political will, as well as improvements in the provision of health and social care, is required. Further, to aid programme planners, more in-depth information than that which may already be available through national statistics on maternal mortality rates or death certificate data is urgently needed. What is required is an in-depth understanding of the clinical, social, cultural or any other underlying factors which lead to mothers' deaths. Such information can be obtained by using any of the five methodologies outlined in the World Health Organizations programme and philosophy for maternal death or disability reviews, ‘Beyond the Numbers’, briefly described here and which are now being introduced in a number of countries around the world.


2022 ◽  
Vol 12 ◽  
Author(s):  
Neerja Chowdhary ◽  
Corrado Barbui ◽  
Kaarin J. Anstey ◽  
Miia Kivipelto ◽  
Mariagnese Barbera ◽  
...  

With population ageing worldwide, dementia poses one of the greatest global challenges for health and social care in the 21st century. In 2019, around 55 million people were affected by dementia, with the majority living in low- and middle-income countries. Dementia leads to increased costs for governments, communities, families and individuals. Dementia is overwhelming for the family and caregivers of the person with dementia, who are the cornerstone of care and support systems throughout the world. To assist countries in addressing the global burden of dementia, the World Health Organisation (WHO) developed the Global Action Plan on the Public Health Response to Dementia 2017–2025. It proposes actions to be taken by governments, civil society, and other global and regional partners across seven action areas, one of which is dementia risk reduction. This paper is based on WHO Guidelines on risk reduction of cognitive decline and dementia and presents recommendations on evidence-based, multisectoral interventions for reducing dementia risks, considerations for their implementation and policy actions. These global evidence-informed recommendations were developed by WHO, following a rigorous guideline development methodology and involved a panel of academicians and clinicians with multidisciplinary expertise and representing geographical diversity. The recommendations are considered under three broad headings: lifestyle and behaviour interventions, interventions for physical health conditions and specific interventions. By supporting health and social care professionals, particularly by improving their capacity to provide gender and culturally appropriate interventions to the general population, the risk of developing dementia can be potentially reduced, or its progression delayed.


Author(s):  
Sergei Scherbov ◽  
Warren C. Sanderson

Probably the most famous demographic riddle of all time is the one that the Sphinx was said to have posed to travellers outside the Greek city of Thebes: ‘Which creature walks on four legs in the morning, two at noon, and three in the evening?’ Unfortunate travellers who could not answer the riddle correctly were immediately devoured. Oedipus, fresh from killing his father, was the first to have got the answer right. The correct answer was ‘humans’. People crawl on their hands and knees as infants, walk on two feet in adulthood, and walk with a cane in old age. We easily recognize the three ages of humans. Humans are born dependent on the care of others. As they grow, their capacities and productivities generally increase, but eventually these reach a peak. After a while, capacities and productivities decline and, eventually, if they are lucky enough to survive, people become elderly, often again requiring transfers and care from others. The human life cycle is the basis of all studies of population ageing, and so we cannot begin to study population ageing without first answering the Sphinx’s riddle. However, answering the Sphinx’s riddle is not enough to get us started on a study of population ageing. We must take two more steps before we begin. First, we must recognize that not all people age at the same rate. As seen in Chapter 5, nowadays more educated people tend to have longer life expectancies than less educated people. Second, we must realize that there is no natural generalization of the Sphinx’s riddle to whole populations. Populations cannot be categorized into the stages of infancy, adulthood, and old age. Indeed, if the Sphinx was reborn today, we might find her sitting near another city and posing an equally perplexing riddle, one especially relevant for our times: ‘What can grow younger as it grows older?’ Answering this riddle correctly is the central challenge of this chapter and the key to understanding population ageing in the twenty-first century.


2019 ◽  
pp. 147-150
Author(s):  
Navneet Kapur ◽  
Robert Goldney

With the increasing recognition of suicide as a major health and social care issue, many suicide prevention organisations have been established locally, nationally and internationally. This chapter includes a number of links to the most prominent of these, but the list is indicative rather than exhaustive. These include the International Association for Suicide Prevention, the International Academy of Suicide Research, the Samaritans, the World Health Organization, and national suicide prevention organizations from across the world.


BMJ ◽  
2017 ◽  
pp. j4279 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shailen Sutaria ◽  
Peter Roderick ◽  
Allyson M Pollock

Author(s):  
Martin Clayton

Music's uses and contexts are so many and so various that the task of cataloguing its functions is daunting: how can we make sense of this diversity? These functions appear to range from the individual (music can affect the way we feel and the way we manage our lives) to the social (it can facilitate the coordination of large numbers of people and help to forge a sense of group identity). This article argues that musical behaviour covers a vast middle ground in which relationships between self and other or between the individual and the collective are played out. It surveys some of the extant literature on music's functions – referring to literature from ethnomusicology, anthropology, musicology, psychology, and sociology, and discussing a wide variety of musical contexts from around the world – and develops an argument emphasizing music's role in the management of relationships between self and other.


Author(s):  
Sergei Scherbov ◽  
Warren C. Sanderson

Abstract People’s views on population ageing are influenced by the statistics that they read about it. The statistical measures in common use today were first developed around a century ago, in a very different demographic environment. For around two decades, we have been studying population ageing and have been arguing that its conventional portrayal is misleading. In this chapter, we summarize some of that research, which provides an alternative picture of population ageing, one that is more appropriate for twenty-first century. More details about our new view of population ageing can be found in. (Sanderson and Scherbov 2019). Population ageing can be measured in different ways. An example of this can found in the UN’s Profiles in Ageing, 2017. One way is to report on the forecasted increase in the number of people 60+ years old in the world.


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