Editor's note: For some time I have been following a weekly blog published each 
Sunday. It's called "Life in the End Zone: perspectives on aging," and is written by Muriel Gillick, MD, who describes herself briefly as "a physician who specializes in the care of patients with advanced illness (palliative care) or advanced age (geriatrics), or both. I am also a professor at Harvard Medical School in Boston, Massachusetts and a faculty member in the Department of Population Medicine within the Harvard Pilgrim Health Care Institute." You can explore Dr. Gillick's blog by clicking on this address.
With more and more of my friends−as well as myself−nearing "the end zone," and with a career-long personal and professional interest in the whole human life cycle, I've found Dr. Gillick's short weekly combination of information and reflections of real value, and wanted to bring them to your attention. I do so this week, with her words below, because she is beginning a series of weekly discussions of a new World Health Organization report on aging that she persuasively describes as "a remarkable and inspiring document."
Posted: 04 Oct 2015
The World Health Organization released a brand new report. It doesn’t have a very snazzy title—it’s called World Report on Ageing and Health—but it’s a remarkable and inspiring document.
Not surprisingly, none of the major US newspapers breathed a word about its release. Maybe the reporters just haven’t had time to go over it: it is, after all, 260 pages. Or maybe they figure that what’s happening in the rest of the world isn’t terribly germane to the US. Perhaps−and I suspect this is the real reason−the media don't want to think about aging. In fact, the report is brimming with fascinating observations and interesting insights, many of which are relevant to the United States both in terms of our own aging population and in terms of national security. There is so much in here worth commenting on, that I think I will devote more than one blog post to the report. Let me begin by sharing some of the most astonishing things I learned in the first half of the report.
The report begins by suggesting that rather than thinking about expenditures on older people as pure costs, they should be seen as investments. It points to a study done in the UK a few years ago which calculated that if you put everything that the government spends on old people in one column (pensions, health care, other social welfare programs) and you put the contributions of older people in another column (taxes, consumer spending, work), you come up with a positive balance. At least in England, the net contribution of older people amounts to 40 billion pounds per year.
One of the most startling differences between this new report and its predecessor is that today's version defines healthy aging as the process of developing and maintaining the functional ability that enables well-being in older age. I like that. All health care systems in all countries, the authors argue, should have as their [preeminent] goal fostering the functional ability of older people by supporting and maintaining their intrinsic capacities and by enabling those with diminished functional capacity to do the things most important to them. This is a marked improvement, in my view, from the last major WHO report, Active Ageing, which came out in 2002, that talked about "optimizing opportunities for health." Then, health was the ultimate objective; now, health and healthcare are means to an end and that end has to do with the ability to function in society.
The description of what health in older age looks like in different countries is both intriguing and sobering. My attention was drawn to a single chart showing the percent of the population age 65-74 and the percent age 75 and older with limitations in one or more activities of daily living, by country. Only a handful of countries were listed. But the gap between the worst off and the best off was shocking—as was the revelation of who occupied the extremes. In first place is Switzerland, with fewer than 10% of the 65-74 year olds suffering a limitation in function and fewer than 20% of those over 75. In last place is Russia, with 60% of the younger old and 80% (that’s not a typo) of the older old reporting at least one ADL [activities of daily living] deficit. I haven’t quite figured out how this relates to Putin’s policy in Ukraine and Syria, but I suspect there’s a connection. There's something very rotten in the state of Russia.
On a more optimistic note, the chapter on “Health Systems” gives some uplifting examples of countries that have introduced novel approaches to improving the well-being of their older populations. Ghana is making an effort to harness its well-established system of community health workers to meet the needs of older people. And Brazil has begun integrating aging into its national family health strategy: it is using multidisciplinary teams comprised of physicians, nurses, and physical therapists, psychologists, nutritionists, occupational therapists, and others to work in community centers and to go into patients’ homes to deliver care.
More to follow....