Research

As practising geriatricians, we firmly believe that the principles of psychological safety and empathy are indispensable to the proficient delivery of healthcare services.

Winter infections have always been a problem for care homes and the residents that live in them. Those of us working in care of older people usually enter the festive season knowing that we’ll spend much of our time caring for care home residents affected by flu, pneumonia, and norovirus.

Age and Ageing have collaborated with the European Renal Association (ERA) journals, Nephrology Dialysis Transplantation (NDT) and Clinical Kidney Journal (CKJ), to curate a collection of ‘Ageing Meets Kidney Disease’ articles.

I am over the moon to be awarded the BGS Rising Star Award for Research 2021. Having joined the BGS as an undergraduate student, the Society has been omnipresent throughout my clinical and academic development.

It was of course an honour to receive the BGS Rising Star award, five years ago in 2017. An unexpected benefit of this was the photograph taken of the then President Dr Eileen Burns, presenting me with the award, which now appears regularly as a stock photo in BGS comms.

New research from King’s College London found that people living with dementia experience higher levels of unplanned hospital admissions towards the end of life compared with the period immediately following their dementia diagnosis. The study found that 40% of all unplanned hospital admissions after a diagnosis of dementia took place in the last year of life.

When my team received National Institute for Health Research funding for ‘Understanding stakeholders’ perspectives on implementing deprescribing in care homes’ (or STOPPING) study in 2019, we were looking forward to 2020.

One in two people in the UK will develop cancer in their lifetime, and as cancer incidence rises with age, a significant number of cancer patients will have pre-existing dementia.

COVID-19 has proven to be particularly harmful to older people, who are more likely to experience severe symptoms, and be hospitalised as a consequence. COVID-19 affects multiple organ systems, has been shown to affect physical function, and is associated with prevalent delirium.

This year’s BGS Rising Star Award for Research has been jointly awarded to Dr Atul Anand and Dr Richard Dodds. Atul is a newly appointed consultant geriatrician at the Royal Infirmary in Edinburgh, and Senior Clinical Research Fellow at the University of Edinburgh. Here he discusses his research into the cardiovascular care of older adults. 

This year’s BGS Rising Star Award for Research has been jointly awarded to Dr Richard Dodds and Dr Atul Anand. Richard is an Honorary Consultant Geriatrician at Newcastle Hospitals and an Intermediate Clinical Fellow at the NIHR Newcastle Biomedical Research Centre.

An interdisciplinary group of clinicians and scientists have carried out a rapid review of the COVID-19 literature in relation to older people, which has just been published in Age and Ageing.

Orthostatic hypotension (OH) is a frequent finding in many of our older patients. It often causes dizziness, unsteadiness and contributes to falls.

The latest NICE guidelines recommend that opportunities to participate in research should be available to people living with dementia at all stages of the condition.

We’re all occasionally tempted to consider ourselves immune to the ageing process. I am a consultant of more than 20 years, yet I can’t help but think of myself as a peer to the new consultants and junior staff I work with.  

What makes you go ‘hmm…?’ about occupational therapy in the UK? Well, the Royal College of Occupational Therapists in collaboration with the James Lind Alliance has launched a UK-wide survey to find out.

When I finished my undergraduate physiotherapy degree I wouldn’t have predicted that a research career was ahead of me! As a newly qualified physiotherapist I began to realise that I had many unanswered questions.

Despite broader currents of ageism within and without medicine, geriatricians are fortunate to be working with people at the richest stage of life, and in a specialty that is intellectually stimulating and professionally rewarding.