Is Asia Ready for the 100-year Life?
Is Asia Ready for the 100-year Life?
Abstract
Due to medical science, technology, better nutrition, and advances in sanitation and public health, the average person’s lifespan today can reasonably expect 20 to 30 more years than their parents. Life expectancies in developed and developing countries are increasing, with the UN predicting the number of centenarians worldwide will rise to 573,000 in 2022. By 2050, nearly 60% of the world’s older people will be living in Asia. Is Asia ready for this seismic shift for the dramatic growth of centenarians? Issues and challenges such as new definitions of old, how to grow old, health care, family structures, urban design, financial sustainability, housing, technology, silver market, social policy and services, etc. will need to be addressed. In this session, experts from Japan, Italy and Hong Kong (homes to some of the highest percentage of centenarians) will share their new visions and perspectives in responding to the above challenges.
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At the "Carlo Besta" Neurological Institute in Milan, since the beginning of her career in the 1990s, she has focused on neurodegenerative dementias, acquiring specific skills in clinical practice, in neuropathological diagnostics and in clinical and basic research, in particular on Alzheimer's disease, frontotemporal dementias and prion pathologies. Since 2014, fascinated by the high prevalence of centenarians living in Trieste, a small town overlooking the sea on the border with Slovenia, she has focused on the clinical, neuropsychological and neuropathological study of brain aging in the centenarian population living in that geographic area. She is the head of the "Centenari a Trieste Study” which aims to identify the risk and protective factors of healthy aging and to characterize the clinical phenotypes of centenarians in relation to cognitive disorders and related neuropathological aspects.
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Dr Takeo OGAWA is conducting research and project development support for active ageing policies, regional development programs, community health and welfare policies, etc. related to population ageing in the Asia Pacific.
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His interests and expertise are in the field of dementia, where he carried out studies on the treatment of the disease and on the investigation of putative risk factors in its incidence. Since dementia incidence increases almost exponentially with age, his interests gradually shifted also to the study of very old people and in particular in centenarians, rather neglect portions of the population from the point of view of the available studies, where he contributed in the planning and coordination of epidemiological studies (Monzino 80-plus Study and Centenari a Trieste Study).
In the field of administrative databases he coordinates analyses relative to health interventions in old subjects, with special interest in patients with polypharmacy. He is also involved in the planning and execution of studies on application of new technologies to improve the well-being of elderly people or patients with dementia.