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Today, we welcomed 22 juniors and seniors in the nursing program of Lewis University in Chicago. The group is touring the Netherlands this week to explore the Dutch healthcare system and compare it to what they are familiar with in the United States. Their schedule includes visits to Bronovo Hospital and Ipse de Bruggen in The Hague, science and medicine museum Boerhaave in Leiden, and various visits in Amsterdam including meeting an expert in addiction care. One student already noticed a difference with her home country: “The Dutch care seems more compassionate.”

Ageing as a treatable disease
At the Leyden Academy, the students attended two lectures. First, social anthropologist Jolanda Lindenberg raised interesting questions about our images of growing older. Jolanda explained that older people are actually more diverse in their wishes and desires, than younger people. In general, the image of older people is worsening, partly due to (bio)medicalization: the tendency to see ageing as something that needs to be prevented and controlled, as a treatable disease. Jolanda’s advice for the nursing students is to end the emphasis on limitations and decline. “Don’t look at how old someone is, but at who someone is and what someone can still do.”

Experiencing growing old
Medical doctor David van Bodegom then explained that many of the diseases we associate with old age, such as diabetes and cardiovascular disease, are actually related to our lifestyle and can often be delayed or prevented. Our modern environment, that constantly seduces us to eat unhealthy snacks and limit our physical activity, is making us sick. By making smart changes to our daily work and living environments and routines, we can make healthier choices unconsciously. To illustrate how the body and senses can change as we grow older, PhD-student Paul van de Vijver demonstrated the “old age suit”. Truly experiencing the simulation of old age impairments was insightful for the students.

People should be encouraged to think about their health rather than concentrate solely on financial matters as part of realistic planning for retirement, according to the new whitepaper Broadening the view on retirement: Health and Retirement. The paper was published today by the Aegon Center for Longevity and Retirement and Leyden Academy on Vitality and Ageing. Health can enable or impede aspirations for retirement and quickly dash long-held dreams of how people would fill their retirement days, say whitepaper authors David van Bodegom, Frank Schalkwijk and Mike Mansfield.

Health requires long-term planning and commitment
Gerontologists and medical doctors Van Bodegom and Schalkwijk of Leyden Academy argue that although many age-related diseases and disabilities only become apparent in retirement, preventive strategies aimed at healthy behavior are most effective when they are started earlier in life and during working lives. Preventive strategies can be applied within the working environment, but naturally extend to the home environment and public spaces. Mike Mansfield, Program Director of Aegon Center for Longevity and Retirement adds: ‘The data of the Aegon Retirement Readiness Survey 2019 show that, in addition to the preventive benefits for health in older age, healthy behaviors during working lives have a positive effect on the retirement readiness of employees.’

Retirement as a teachable moment
However, it is never too late to adopt a healthier lifestyle, and even retirement itself may trigger people to change their unhealthy routines. When a life event or circumstance leads to a higher probability of adopting behavioral change, this is called a “teachable moment”. Since the moment of retirement itself could be a teachable moment for health behavioral change, medical professionals, welfare workers, local governments, employers and pension providers should work together and seize the opportunity to guide people to effective healthy lifestyle interventions.

Beyond the traditional financial scope
The authors urge employers and pension providers to explore the opportunities for offering guidance to successful retirement beyond the traditional financial scope. Focusing on the health of employees and retirees should be part of any retirement planning scenario.

About the whitepaper series
The Aegon Center for Longevity and Retirement has invited the researchers of Leyden Academy to help reflect on retirement from different academic angles, and inspire Aegon to encourage the debate on retirement beyond the traditional financial scope. This has resulted in the whitepapers Why do we retire? (December 2018) and the edition on Health and retirement published today.

From July 21 – August 2 in Heidelberg, Germany, we present euVENTION, the Summer School for Innovation in Chronic Disease Intervention. After a successful edition last year in Leiden, this EIT Health Summer School is organized by Heidelberg University with Leyden Academy on Vitality and Ageing and Universidade de Coimbra (Portugal). During the two-week programme, multidisciplinary teams of students will develop ideas into business models that can address challenges provided by industry partners, academia, and non-profit organisations. The innovations they work on should contribute to healthy living and active aging for people with chronic diseases.

Innovation to address chronic diseases
Participants in the euVENTION Summer School are challenged to come up with healthcare solutions using co-creation, design thinking, rapid prototyping and business modelling. Participants are prepared for this activity with inspirational lectures about the basics of innovation to address chronic diseases. This is followed by guided working groups to help students develop their innovation skills. Participants co-design, validate and test ideas at each stage, with all target audiences concerned. By the end of euVENTION, participants will have gone through all phases of a real-world innovation trajectory, and they will have acquired the necessary set of skills and knowledge to start entrepreneurial activities.

Open-minded people invited to apply
euVENTION welcomes applications from all open-minded people who want to change the future of health. The Summer School is designed for PhD students, but all dedicated master students, young professionals or motivated individuals are welcome to apply, as we believe multi-disciplinary teams can come up with the best and most innovative solutions.

Please visit the euVENTION website for more information, the full programme and the registration form. For an overview of Summer Schools in 2019, visit the EIT Health website.

Leiden, The Netherlands, 24 April 2019 – A wide-ranging and multi-disciplinary Dutch team of experts of research into ageing has obtained a grant in excess of 8.5 million euros for a comprehensive research programme of both factors and practical solutions which can contribute to ageing healthily as well as improving personal vitality. The ambition of the team is to identify early signs of functional decline in seniors, attenuate decline and restore body functions to allow seniors to increase the number of healthy years. In this research programme, which starts in October 2019, nine institutions and eight private partners participate, including Leyden Academy on Vitality and Ageing.

The Principal Investigator of the programme is Prof. dr. Eline Slagboom, chair of the Dutch Society of Research on Ageing (DuSRA) and researcher at the Leiden University Medical Center (LUMC). “The life expectancy of Dutch citizens is still increasing. However together with greying of the population, the number of seniors with one or more age-related disease conditions is also increasing. Consequently, we want to generate a platform for enduring relationships between researchers and citizens to achieve healthier ageing outcomes. This represents the largest ever public-private collaboration in The Netherlands in the area of ‘healthy ageing’.

Attenuation of the Ageing Process
Under the DuSRA-VOILA umbrella, three joined projects exist: VOILA (Vitality Oriented Innovations for the Life course of the Ageing Society), SMARTage (Senescence Models, Aging Research and Therapeutics, led by Cleara Biotech) and Neuromet (Neuroinflammation and metabolomics). Our unique proposition is that, instead of working on a single disease condition, we want to tackle a number of conditions associated with aging. For instance, one of the teams is discovering new ‘biomarkers’ (diagnostic signal compounds), which allows assessment as to which seniors have the highest risk of accelerated ageing as well as elevated frailty during medical interventions. Another angle of research is how combinations of life style interventions influence the health status of their metabolism, the immune system, the intestinal microbiota and the musculature.

A complementary research theme is ageing at the cellular level. In this case the research teams focus on senescent (‘rusty’) cells, their identification and their specific removal. Applying timely interventions using largely known mechanistic understanding, the researchers anticipate to attenuate disease such as heart failure, dementia and certain types of cancer.

Largest collaboration on Healthy Ageing in The Netherlands
The VOILA consortium is a collaboration of the Medical Centers of Leiden (LUMC), Utrecht (UMC Utrecht), Groningen (notably the ERIBA Institute), Rotterdam (Erasmus MC) and Maastricht. Also Wageningen University, the Dutch Institute of Public Health (RIVM), the Leiden-Amsterdam Centre for Drug Research and the Delft University of Technology are public partners. The private partners are Royal FrieslandCampina, Cleara Biotech, Sciex, Interscience/Sample Q, &niped, Diabetes Fonds, health insurer Zorg & Zekerheid and Leyden Academy. The VOILA programme is co-financed by a grant of 6 million euros from ZonMw and Health~Holland, Topsector Life Sciences & Health. The remainder is contributed by private partners.

Read more about the programme VOILA and the Dutch Society of Research on Ageing DuSRA.

For more information or interview requests, please contact Danique van der Gaauw (ZonMw) via email / phone +31 (0)70 349 5311 or Tessa van Leeuwen (LUMC) via email / phone +31 (0)6 1137 1146.

In April 2019, Leyden Academy researchers Frank Schalkwijk and David van Bodegom published a Letter to the Editor in the high-impact journal JAMA Cardiology, in response to a study that showed that the gradual increase of blood pressure with age is inappropriately considered a normal characteristic of ageing. Schalkwijk and Van Bodegom argue that the finding that in Western populations the increase of blood pressure starts at early ages indicates that entire Western populations are at high risk for hypertension and cardiovascular disease. Nevertheless, in current high-risk strategies that prevail in medical practice, we wait until an individual exceeds a certain cutoff point to consider them to be at risk. This strategy has been proven effective, but for further reducing the incidence of cardiovascular disease, treating high-risk individuals even more intensively might not be the most fruitful strategy. Therefore, health care professionals should focus more on the population level societal determinants of a healthy lifestyle in addition to prevailing prevention policies that primarily rely on high-risk strategies.

Read the full article here: Absence of the Association of Blood Pressure With Age in a Remote Venezuelan Population Renews the Call for Population-Wide Interventions.

People across the globe share many of the same wants and needs as they grow older. This is why the AARP, America’s largest organization dedicated to empowering seniors to choose how they live as they age, also looks abroad for inspiration, innovations and insights. In the annual publication The Journal, the AARP showcases thought leadership around the globe concerning all issues related to ageing, to share promising ideas so that others might be inspired and even build off them. Each year, a specific country is explored in-depth to better understand its approach to the ageing challenge. After Japan in 2018, the AARP now decided to focus on The Netherlands, one of the small, innovative economies featured last year in the AARP’s Ageing Readiness and Competitiveness Report.

Cycling, volunteering and pickled herring
The special feature in The Journal offers a multifaceted image of ageing in the Netherlands. In a prologue, Hugo de Jonge, the Dutch Minister of Health, Welfare, and Sports, discusses how ageing in place, nursing care, and social isolation are all connected, and explains how the government aims to empower civil society, social enterprise, and companies to work together to improve care and support to seniors. Professor Joris Slaets of Leyden Academy introduces a typical Dutch older couple, Wim and Ineke, to paint a picture of what growing older in the Netherlands looks like. The Journal also includes profiles of intergenerational care community Humanitas Deventer, nursing farm De Reigershoeve, the iZi Living Lab, the Dutch cycling and volunteering culture, the age-friendly and ‘super-diverse’ city of The Hague, and many more. The Journal also introduces some older Dutch persons, like 79-year old Hans Ulrich from Oegstgeest. A picture gallery depicts ‘a day in the life’ of Hans, who represented the Leyden Academy in 2018. You can see him smoking his pipe in his garden, walking to the mall with his grandson and enjoying a pickled herring as a savory snack.

Listening to older individuals
One of the lessons Debra Whitman, Executive Vice President and Chief Public Policy Officer at the AARP, took from her visit to The Netherlands is that not all of the most forward-thinking approaches to ageing had a high-tech feel. Sometimes low-tech turns out to be exactly what the older adults in the community found most valuable. Whitman was also impressed by the prominent focus placed on human touch and caring in the Netherlands. Technology is used as an assistant to enhance the quality of life of older people, not as a substitute for human contact. “In all our work to improve the lives of older adults, we must never forget that we’re not talking about an abstract ‘population’. These are noble individuals with contributions to make and wishes to be honored. The best solutions come from listening to the people we aim to serve, and learning from them what they need, and, even more important, what they want,” she concludes. As Professor Slaets puts it in his contribution to The Journal: “From the perspective of the elderly, there is a clear demand for more individually tailored and person-centered care. Assertive baby boomers will expect and accept nothing less.”

You can find the 2019 edition of The Journal on the AARP website or download the full report here (pdf file). For a direct link to the contribution of Professor Slaets, please click here.

Today Leyden Academy hosted the IMISCOE conference, with the aim to bridge state-of-the-art research and practice on the care for and social well-being of older migrants.

The morning session focused on the complex interconnections of different forms of care provided by various individuals and organisations in local places (the private home, the neighbourhood, care institutions). Long-term care is increasingly decentralised to the local level, boosting new combinations of informal family care, professional care and volunteer work. On the basis of recent research from the Netherlands and Switzerland, the session explored the implications of this development for older migrants, providers of mainstream and specialised care services, and policymakers.

The afternoon session focused on different aspects of older migrants’ social well-being in the Netherlands. Although it is often referred to, the social domain of well-being remains secondary to issues of health and provision and quality of care for older migrants. This session explored which aspects of well-being are common to current research, debates and practices. and which aspects older migrants themselves acknowledge as important. The three key social themes of well-being were: loneliness, social participation and transnational living.

This conference was organised by Roos Pijpers (Radboud University Nijmegen), Eva Soom Ammann (Bern University of Applied Sciences), Tineke Fokkema (Netherlands Interdisciplinary Demographic Institute/Erasmus University Rotterdam) and Nina Conkova (Leyden Academy on Vitality and Ageing)

The technical guidance Health of older refugees and migrants was released in November 2018 by the WHO Regional Office for Europe. The report aims to inform policy and practice development specifically related to improving the health and wellbeing of older refugees and migrants in Europe. Ageing and migration are complex multidimensional processes, shaped by a range of factors at the micro, meso and macro levels over the life-course of the individual. Responding to the needs of older refugees and migrants, must therefore be integrated into all dimensions of ageing policies and practices across Europe. Author of this important report is Maria Kristiansen, Associate Professor at the Center for Healthy Aging and the Department of Public Health, University of Copenhagen.

Conversation tool for older migrants
The WHO technical guidance report includes several ‘promising practices’, including a project from Leyden Academy (page 21) regarding people-centered engagement of older migrants in health and long-term care. It features the Life and Vitality Assessment (LAVA), an instrument to map and discuss what older people find important in their lives. We are in the process of developing a version of the LAVA specifically for older migrants, based partly on the insights we obtained from a series of focus groups in 2018 among the largest non-Western migrant groups in the Netherlands.

For more information, please visit the WHO Regional Office for Europe website.

Aegon Center for Longevity and Retirement (ACLR) is publishing a series of four whitepapers to broaden the view on retirement, beyond the traditional financial scope. The series is one of the results of the long-lasting cooperation between Aegon and Leyden Academy on Vitality and Ageing. The first whitepaper was released today and examines the question: Why do we retire?

Retirement is not simply a financial issue; it is a phase of life where people aspire to stay socially connected, participate in their communities, and remain economically active. Therefore, research areas that deal with the connection between retirement and important aspects of later life such as health, vitality, life satisfaction and the image of elderly can contribute to helping people prepare for retirement and their societal position and engagement after retirement. For this reason, ACLR has invited the researchers of Leyden Academy on Vitality and Ageing to help reflect on retirement from different academic angles, and inspire Aegon to encourage the debate on retirement beyond the economic aspects.

This first whitepaper ‘Why do we retire?’ explores the various wishes and ambitions that people have for retirement, based on the combined results of the surveys of Aegon Center for Longevity and Retirement and Leyden Academy. You can read the whitepaper on the Aegon website, accompanied by a personal reflection on the issue by Mike Mansfield, Program Director at ACLR.

In the three whitepapers that follow in 2019, we will further broaden the view on retirement from the perspectives of health and vitality, well-being and life satisfaction, and finally the image of retirement and retirees.

On Tuesday 19 February 2019 the IMISCOE conference ‘Care for and social well-being of older migrants’ will be held in Leiden. In the Netherlands, the number of older adults with a migration background is growing rapidly. Due to cultural, socio-economic and demographic differences with nonmigrant older adults, older migrants generate specific care demands as well as a need for new interventions and facilities aimed at their well-being.

The conference will focus on the exchange of knowledge between researchers, professionals and policy makers in care and welfare. The researchers will present and discuss with the participants practical applications of recent research into local aspects of care for older migrants, including district-oriented work and family care, and aspects of social well-being, including loneliness, social participation and transnational relations. There will be room for supplying suggestions for follow-up research and to further strengthen the link between research and practice. For the full program and details about location please refer to the brochure.

The official language is English, and participation is free. The number of places is limited so quick registration is advised.