The Five Percent

It’s a dirty little secret that nobody other than professional geriatricians and palliative care doctors seems to know. But inside those circles, most everyone is aware that palliative care is an up and coming field that has tripled in size since 2000, while geriatrics is floundering, with fellowship training slots going unfilled in recent years and the number of board certified geriatricians declining. So an editorial in the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society advocating that the two disciplines work together to promote a joint agenda set me to thinking: why the difference? 

A slew of factors have contributed to the success of palliative care. As Dr. Diane Meier points out in her editorial, the decision to push the field by “making the business case” to hospital CEOs rather than by focusing on getting NIH research funding was crucial. The creation of CAPC, the Center to Advance Palliative Care, which focused on leadership training and skills development, was a brilliant innovation. But I couldn’t help wondering whether the different trajectories of palliative care and geriatrics, which both address the needs of the 5% of the population who are the sickest—and who use half of all health care resources—could be traced in part to different attitudes toward the old and toward the dying. An article by geriatrician Dr. Louise Aronson in a new series of groundbreaking articles on aging in the Lancet suggests attitudes matter. 

Dr. Aronson quotes the comments of Dr. Robert Butler, in many ways the founder of contemporary geriatrics, that “aging is the neglected stepchild of the human life cycle.” Writing 40 years ago, Butler made the case that “ageism” allows people to distinguish themselves from older people, to see themselves as safe from the debility and decline that afflict many in the final phase of life. Aronson tells several anecdotes to emphasize that the disdain for old people persists in medical circles today: a surgeon who laughs at a student who says she wants to go into geriatrics and jokes that the “disease” the student will specialize in is “constipation;” a senior physician joking that the best way to avoid the adverse consequences of hospitalization in the elderly is “never to build nursing homes within 100 miles of hospitals.”

I remember that my decision to do a fellowship in geriatrics was met with the same mix of derision and incredulity 30 years ago. Another young doctor in my medical residency program gave me an extremely backhanded compliment: “But you’re very smart,” she said, “so why would you go into geriatrics?” Could it be that palliative care is thriving because we are ready to face dying but geriatrics is struggling because we are unwilling to face what comes before the end?

Aging is one of the greatest challenges faced in the world today. Throughout the world, people are living longer. Falling fertility rates and rising life expectancy have led to an aging population in the developed world, but the same phenomena are striking the developing world with a vengeance: in the US, it took took 68 years for the proportion of the population over age 65 to double and in France it took 116 years—but in China, it will happen over a period of 26 years and in Brazil in a mere 21 years.  The demographic shift has been accompanied by a shift in the “global burden of disease:” in 2010, 23% of the total disease burden in the world was attributable to disorders in people over age 60. The most burdensome disorders afflicting our aging world include heart disease, stroke, chronic lung disease and diabetes, as well as lung cancer, falls, visual impairment, and dementia. The good news is that we already know a great deal about what we need to do to increase the “lifespan,” as one of the commentaries in the Lancet series calls the length of time that an individual is able to maintain good health. 

We need to use a conceptual framework that focuses on functioning rather than on disease. We need to build and support an appropriately trained workforce—both formal and informal (ie family) caregivers. A comprehensive public health strategy must taken into consideration the physical and the social environment. It needs to be grounded into an approach that begins with comprehensive assessment, elicits patient preferences, and implements a treatment plan that is continuous, coordinated, and multidisciplinary. So if we know what to do, why don’t we do it?

The barriers to a global strategy for aging are many. They include a health care system that focuses on treatment of single diseases in isolation—even though most older people have “multimorbidity” and following guidelines for single diseases leads to over-treatment and excess costs. They include social factors, such as inadequate income protection and lack of caregivers. They include lack of knowledge—as the incidence of heart disease falls and treatment of cancer improves, a larger and larger percentage of older people will die of dementia, a disease with no known treatment. Currently, 44 million people have dementia world-wide, and that number is projected to rise to 136 million by 2050. But perhaps the greatest barrier is ageism, the belief that poor health is inevitable, that all interventions are ineffective, and that better outcomes, even if they can be achieved, are not inherently valuable. 

We need to tackle the global challenge of aging. The World Health Organization has taken an important first step: at the World Assembly last May, it agreed to prioritize work on aging, to develop a “World Report on Ageing and Health,” and then to generate a Global Strategy and Action Plan.

But it cannot just be the WHO who cares about aging. We all need to care.