Johannesburg - In research to be led by a professor of Clinical Epidemiology at the University of Bristol and The Health Research Unit Zimbabwe (THRU-ZIM), more than 5 000 older adults will be part of a programme that will look at the life expectancy of people living in sub-Saharan Africa.
Participants will be from Zimbabwe, The Gambia, and South Africa in an effort to understand how commonly people are ageing healthily or unhealthily and how this influences quality of life.
The five-year programme "Healthy Ageing in Sub-Saharan Africa" will develop an evidence-based clinical framework to assess and manage chronic disorders of ageing, such as walking, balance, nutrition, memory, mood, eyesight, and hearing.
Gregson says that thanks to advances in health and sanitation, people around the world are living longer than ever before, with the greatest changes happening in Africa.
"In these added years of life, older people understandably want health and wellbeing, which is ‘healthy ageing’," said Gregson.
Healthcare services are not currently set up to provide for rapidly ageing populations, meaning older people are more likely to be living with disability and dependence, he said.
"We want to understand why some people age healthily and some ‘unhealthily’ in Zimbabwe, The Gambia, and South Africa, and then develop an ‘Ageing Check-up’, run by nurses and therapists in local communities, where older people can be assessed and offered practical management to maintain their health as they age," added Gregson.
The study will cost £2 million (R48m) and will focus on known health problems in the region, including high blood pressure, type 2 diabetes, back and joint pain, depression and anxiety, HIV, uncorrected vision and hearing impairments, malnutrition, including obesity, and undiagnosed memory decline.
The team will work with a range of stakeholders, including healthcare experts and older people themselves, to develop a health check-up for people over 65. The check-up will be trialled in Zimbabwe to assess the feasibility, acceptability, effectiveness, and costs of implementing community-based health checks.
Towards the end of the research programme, a set of tools will be developed to guide the person-centred assessment and management of older people, ready for scale-up across sub-Saharan Africa.
The Star