old age

No abstract

Stroke is the major cause of disability in the community. Most strokes are due to blocked arteries in the brain. Evidence is accumulating that clot-busting drugs improve outcome after ischaemic stroke. Recombinant tissue plasminogen activator (rt-PA) is licensed for the treatment of selected patients within three hours of acute ischaemic stroke in many parts of the world, and stroke services are being developed so that eligible patients can receive this treatment as soon as possible after the onset of stroke symptoms.

It is widely assumed that geriatric medicine was an invention of the twentieth century. However, from the time of Hippocrates, there has been interest in the prolongation of the lifespan, the maintenance of health in old age and agerelated disease patterns. The debate about whether old age was a natural phenomenon or a disease state was not resolved until the nineteenth century. Calls for medicine relating to old age to be recognised as a discrete entity at the time when medical specialisation was developing were disregarded until the second half of the twentieth century.