Health Maintenance in Older Adults

Abstract

Since the period of great progress against epidemic and acute diseases, a host of major chronic diseases afflicting older adults have emerged as the key health problems of our time. Concomitantly there arises the need for deeper knowledge of the causes, dimensions and subtleties of age decline in the individual's reserve capacities and resistance to disease, and the need for better understanding of the relationship of chronic diseases to environmental factors as an integral part of our search for basic measures toward health maintenance and disease prevention in older adults. The age decline in reserve capacities and in resistance to disease can either be slowed down by preventive measures and even reversed to some extent by physical exercise, or it can be further aggravated by excessive demands beyond their declining limits. The relationship of chronic diseases to environmental factors is illustrated by the effects of nutrition on the life span, on atherosclerosis and on other diseases. The relationship of obesity, diabetes and coronary heart disease to one another, to the increased ingestion of fat or sugar, to gorging, and to long‐spaced, heavy meal‐eating habits is discussed. In view of the sum total of environmental influences, a lifetime application of basic measures for health maintenance and disease prevention is stressed. Unfortunately, much too often a compromise with health is becoming an accepted pattern, possibly because of an increasing willingness to consider health not as a pure and incontestable human good, but as a generally desirable element, in active competition with other human needs such as economic gain or just plain pleasurable living.

Nutrition and Geriatric: An Overview

“…53 • To balance total calories, it is recommended that intake of complex carbohydrates increases, while fat intake reduces. 40,54 Dietary Fiber…”

“…39 This decline is caused by a dropping lean body tissue, which is mostly linked to an atrophy of muscle. 40 The remaining energy expenditure is made up of calories used for work and exercise. The age, on average, limits their lifestyle and exercise less, which leads to muscle mass loss.…”

Modern Health Care Delivery for the Aged: A Program in Total Health Maintenance*

“…To deal adequately with the broad complex of interrelated medical problems which may beset the geriatric patient, it is necessary that his health care situation be managed on a total or “holistic” basis (6–8). He must be treated as an integrated and total person.…”

Potentialities for Research on Mechanisms of Aging

“…Its understanding has been a continuous challenge to biologists (1). It is related to our efforts toward health maintenance and disease prevention in the later years of life, as an integral part of our need for deeper knowledge of the causes, dimensions and subtleties of age decline in the individual's resistance to stress and disease (2, 3).…”

“…leads to the inhibition of protein synthesis, which in turn stops RNA synthesis (14) and DNA replication, including cell divisions. This results in a general slowdown of all the metabolic and biosynthetic processes and is in turn related to the age decline in the individual's capacities and in his resistance to stress and disease (2, 3).…”