People vary in what they know, understand and believe about death and dying. Information can help families and carers prepare as someone approaches the last few weeks and days of life.
Read more on CareSearch website. Read more on palliAGED website. The Murray Valley encephalitis virus was first isolated in an epidemic in The virus is endemic in Northern Australia but rarely affects humans.
Why spirituality matters. At the end-of-life, people can question beliefs and values as well as how they have lived their life. End-of-life care is the support available to terminally ill patients when they find themselves at the final stage of life. The significance of being able to provide compassionate care that eases the suffering of people in their last days cannot be overstated. For a person to remain at home as a terminal illness progresses, practical help and increasing care from family and friends is needed.
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Francis Crick Institute. Sign up for the Nature Briefing newsletter — what matters in science, free to your inbox daily. Advanced search. One survey suggests unders are barely half as likely as overs to say retirement is their top financial concern. When you're saving for your first house or raising a young family, you may not feel a pressing need to provide for the old person you'll one day become.
Indeed, you may find it hard to conceive of that future old person as you. Behavioural economists have come up with some clever solutions, such as automatically enrolling people in workplace pension schemes and scheduling more saving from future pay rises.
These "nudges" work pretty well - we could opt out but instead we tend to save through sheer inertia. But they don't solve the fundamental demographic problem.
No amount of saving changes the fact we'll always need current workers to generate the wealth to support current pensioners - whether that's through paying taxes, renting properties owned by retirees, or working for companies in which pension funds are the major shareholders. Some think we'll need a more radical shift in our attitudes to old age. There's talk of retirement itself being "retired".
Perhaps, like our ancestors, we'll be expected to work for as long as we're able. But the varied customs of ancestral societies should give us pause, because they appear to have evolved in response to some discomfortingly hard-nosed trade-offs. Whether elders could expect lovingly pre-chewed food or an axe by the big river seems to have depended on whether the benefits they offered the tribe outweighed the costs of supporting them. Today's societies are rich and sedentary by comparison - we can afford the rising cost of pensions, if we choose.
But there are other differences, too. Once we relied on elders to store knowledge and instruct the young. Now, knowledge dates quickly - and who needs Grandma when we have schools and Wikipedia?
We might hope we're long past the days when levels of respect for old people unconsciously tracked some balance of costs and benefits. Still, if we believe a dignified old age is a right, perhaps we should be saying that, as clearly and as often as possible. The author writes the Financial Times's Undercover Economist column. Do welfare states boost economic growth, or stunt it? Why are French workers on a nationwide strike? Could blood transfusions from the young slow ageing?
Dementia patients who were given transfusions of blood plasma from younger donors aged between 18 and 30 years old showed signs of improvement in a recent trial. Their research, however, has yet to be published in any peer-reviewed journals and has been criticised for not accounting for the placebo effect.
But there are some studies in animals that suggest there may be a biological basis for the effects these treatments are having. In , a study by researchers at the Harvard Stem Cell Institute showed the muscle strength of mice could be improved by a growth factor found in young blood called GDF11, though the findings could not be replicated. BBC Future has previously explored some of the other approaches in animals that could lead to a longer life.
Meanwhile, others say the key to longevity is as simple as cutting the amount of calories you consume in a day. A number of companies even offer the opportunity for wealthy clients to preserve their bodies in this way, such the Alcor Life Extension Foundation. However, to date, none of their clients have ever been resurrected from their icy storage units.
But regardless of how it is achieved, extending human lifespans by decades or even hundreds of years will present us with some difficult social realities. As BBC Future has explored before , there could be major societal impacts if we all start living longer.
There are some that fear greater longevity could lead to swelling populations and raise doubts that our planet could support such numbers. De Grey himself says he is often asked about whether the technologies he is working on could be abused by wealthy tyrants to give them extended lifespans, while others ask whether we will simply be bored by lives that can be continuously extended. He has little time for such questions and believes that other technologies — such as artificial meat, desalination, solar energy and other renewables — will increase the carrying capacity of the planet, allowing more people to live longer lives.
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