News

The UK is hosting a G8 summit on dementia in London on 11 December. The summit aims to develop co-ordinated global action on dementia. People will be able to watch live coverage of the G8 dementia summit on the Dementia Challenge site. There will be live video streaming of all the main sessions and a live blog providing a written commentary. Read more here.

The European Research Council (ERC), with a budget of over €13 billion under Horizon 2020, is the largest funding programme supporting frontier research in Europe.

Science Foundation Ireland is a National Contact Point for the ERC. In partnership with the Irish Research Council, SFI is providing significantly enhanced information and advice on applications through a new, ERC-dedicated section of its website.

Finding a way to slow the biological processes of ageing will do more to extend the period of healthy life in humans than attacking individual diseases alone, according to some of the nation's top gerontologists writing in the latest issue of Public Policy & Aging Report (PP&AR), titled "The Longevity Dividend: Geroscience Meets Geropolitics." Read more here.

Ireland’s National Positive Ageing Strategy was published on April 24 2013. The Strategy promised “a society in which the equality, independence, participation, care, self-fulfilment and dignity of older people are pursued at all times", Patricia Conboy former head of Older & Bolder writes in a new blog. She cites the absence of an implementaion plan seven months later as a 'broken promise'. Read her blog here.

More than half of older adults in the United States - an estimated 18.7 million people - have experienced bothersome pain in the previous month, impairing their physical function and underscoring the need for public health action on pain. Many of those interviewed by investigators for a study published in the current issue of PAIN- reported pain in multiple areas. Read more here.

*Researcher-led outline application form now available*

The PHR Programme is now accepting applications to its researcher-led workstream. In addition to applications under the normal remit, we are looking for applications under the following areas:

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People may feel ashamed or afraid to talk about abuse, including the verbal kind, so the researchers from Northeastern University asked their older subjects to respond to questions by touching a computer screen. It gave them more privacy. 38 percent of the older people surveyed, whose average age was about 75, reported at least one incident of verbal mistreatment from their primary caregivers in the past year. Read more here.

Cancer rates go up with age, but more experts are suggesting that older people might be better off without regular screening for the disease. That position is supported by the latest data suggesting that while early detection of cancer benefits younger people by giving them a chance to treat tumors and improve their prognosis, the same isn’t true for the elderly. Read more: Why You Might Skip Cancer Screening if You're Older