Chronic Illness

Reduction of Chronic Illness in Aging

First Initial EBP Question

What are the measures and steps required to reduce the chronic illness among the aging people?

Implementation of a Strategy

Overview of the topic

It has been estimated that by 2030, all those adults who are 65 years or older are going to increase in large number in the coming years. This is a major concern for all the healthcare researchers, hospitals and practitioners as they need to meet the challenges of treating the large number of aging population in the US. They would need to design the public health efforts in order to promote the health and functional independence of the older adults in order to keep them healthy. The research has shown that it is not necessary that the poor health would certainly be the result of aging. They continue to engage themselves with family and friends which is a major aspect of their healthy life. The essential element for the healthcare practitioners is to help the aging adults in the prevention of chronic diseases and also reducing the associated complications. On average, 80% of the older adults suffer from chronic condition and half of the aging patients suffer from chronic illness. The infectious diseases such as the influenza and pneumococcal disease has a high probability rate among the older adults. The maximum efforts are required by the healthcare practitioners for preventing any sort of risk factors in illness. The effective intervention techniques must be implemented by the healthcare specialists to achieve a common goal to keep the aging population healthy in the entire country (Bonomi, 2002).

Major Health Factors of the Aging Adults

The complexity of care needs is greatly affected by comorbidity. It has been estimated that approximately 75% of older adults have at least one chronic medical condition and 50% have at least two, where heart disease (33%), cancer (22%), and stroke (8%) are the leading causes of death. In a national survey, it was reported that older adults with cancer are more likely to report comorbidity (52%) than those participants with no cancer history (44%). When a cancer diagnosis is presented, it is therefore pertinent to coordinate this treatment with regimens already in place for pre-existing, chronic conditions. Such coordination can often be a delicate process, whereby patients and physicians need to be aware of medication and treatment interactions, in addition to treatment burden. The presence of other chronic conditions along with cancer (e.g., diabetes, hypertension, etc.), disability, and/or syndromes typically seen only in an older population (e.g., Alzheimer's disease), implies a greater level of care. Enhanced care coordination will therefore be needed to address the complex issues associated with comorbidity (e.g., medication interactions, treatment burden, etc) (Casalino, 2003). The statistics related to the cause of death of the older adults because of their disease is mentioned in the next page.

Figure 1: Statistics of Cause of Death among old people

While social isolation may be requisite in consideration of the demands of the disease ...