The Institute of Neurological Sciences, Voluntary Health Services, celebrated its 46th foundation day by honouring senior specialist doctors in the city with lifetime excellence awards, at a function organised here on Sunday.
Chairman emeritus of the institute Krishnamoorthy Srinivas said the least the institute could do was to honour seniors, who were his teachers and senior colleagues and thank them for their “magnificent and significant” support.
A special lecture on ageing and the burden of chronic diseases was also organised. “There is no such thing as ageing, that's my first take-home message,” began Albert Hofman of the Department of Epidemiology, Erasmus Medical Center, Rotterdam, The Netherlands.
“It is a unique phenomenon in homo sapiens in the past 150 years that there has been a very spectacular increase in life expectancy, owing to industrial revolution and increase in nutrition, sanitation, good drinking water and vaccination. While in the 1950s and 1960s there was a dip in life expectancy due to cardiovascular disease, preventive methods stemmed the dip from the 1970s, he said delivering the special lecture. The increase in life expectancy is so dramatic that we live a week and gain a weekend,” he explained.
But, there was an increase in absolute number of diseases. The incidence of dementia, stroke, and Parkinson's diseases increases with age.
Almost all countries in the next 30 years could expect to see a 200 to 300 per cent increase in the manifestation of these diseases, he said.
Citing a study conducted to understand the etiology of ageing, he said genes, environmental causes and gene-environment interaction were responsible for ageing, he said. “If we want to further add to longevity we have to look at the pleiotropic causes [which include genes, inflammatory factors, oxidative stress and vascular factors] as targets for prevention,” he said.
