Summary: People with dementia can sometimes struggle to communicate and build relationships with others, especially in care environments. Heeley City Farm, located in Sheffield, runs animal-assisted therapy sessions called ‘Farming Comes to You’, that help bring warmth, connection, and …
Dementia is a complex condition that can progress rapidly in some people. Professor Kelvin Jordan and Dr Michelle Marshall from Keele University are leading a team of researchers using routinely gathered patient data from GP medical records to find …
Published November 2020 When we talk about ageing, people often highlight the external signs. But there’s plenty more going on inside our bodies as we get older. Worn-out senescent cells accumulate within our tissues, pumping out inflammatory chemicals – …
Skin wounds that won’t heal are a big problem, particularly for older people, and have a big impact on quality of life. However, current treatments and antibiotics aren’t very effective, running the risk of long-term, chronic infection. Professor Phil Stephens and his team are investigating whether packets of bioactive compounds secreted by stem cells could create an anti-microbial environment that will help skin wounds to heal better.
When investigating diseases of ageing and their causes, it can be very difficult, time-consuming and expensive to conduct randomised controlled trials. Instead, Drs Reecha Sofat and Valerie Kuan are using a technique called Mendelian Randomisation to understand the underlying risk factors for the sight loss condition age-related macular degeneration, shedding light on new ideas for prevention and treatment.
Older people may need support from a variety of health and social care providers. The IMPACTAgewell® project brings together a range of different providers to create a holistic model of care. They support older people to understand and navigate the health and social care services that they need, empowering them to take control.
Change is a common and necessary part of care environments – but what sort of culture within care homes leads to them adapting well to change? Dr Al Ross and his team wanted to understand what ‘good care’ looks like, discover which aspects of care homes’ systems and culture support this, and share their findings to improve life for older people in care homes.
Music therapy can enhance people’s lives, and stimulate their minds. Dr Fabia Franco and her team are assessing the impact of music therapy on older people’s cognition through a randomised controlled trial. An important factor in this will be the use of human-like robots in addition to the face-to-face sessions, to see whether this is a viable way to deliver the therapy.
Age-related macular degeneration is one of the biggest causes of sight loss in the UK – yet the only treatment available for the condition involves injections directly into the eye. Many patients are desperate for a less invasive treatment, especially one that doesn’t require hospital visits. Dr Felicity de Cogan and her team have discovered a way to carry drugs across the eye’s protective membranes, moving towards the development of eye drops to treat the disease.
We know that people are living longer, but simply measuring life expectancy doesn’t tell us anything about the quality of life that older people are experiencing. In this research, Professor Carol Jagger and her team are using longitudinal data to assess how much of this increased life expectancy is spent with disability – and whether changes are seen across the population, or are affected by deprivation.
In this innovative community programme, co-funded with the Alzheimer’s Society, researchers will work in and with care homes to develop a model for research that is collaborative and effective.
The techniques used to make dentures are labour-intensive, expensive, inaccurate and have remained largely unchanged for decades. Recent advances in technology now make it possible to create 3D printed dentures, so Dr Andrew Keeling is finding out if this is feasible, and whether the results are acceptable to wearers and as good or better than existing dentures.