REHOVOT — Israelis are getting older. Only 3.8 percent of them were over 65 when the state was established in 1948. Now, 55 years later, the figure is 10 percent.
While many Israeli institutions are studying aging and its consequences — biological, medical, sociological and economic — the most comprehensive undertaking is by the Center for Multidisciplinary Research in Aging at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev.
Professor Amiela Globerson, its director, sees herself primarily as a “scientific matchmaker.” She’s the one who “brings together people from a variety of fields in an effort to understand and ameliorate the problems of the elderly.”
Globerson spent most of her own career doing biomedical research, with an emphasis on aging, in the laboratories of the Weizmann Institute of Science. “However, even then I realized that one cannot dissociate the biology of aging from psychological and socioeconomic factors, and that a comprehensive research approach is required,” she said.
At Ben-Gurion many scientists are doing lab research — perhaps exploring the physiology of the aging brain, immunity in the elderly or Alzheimer’s-dementia — in cooperation with doctors at Beersheva’s Soroka Medical Center, which is also on the campus. Affiliated with the center are sociologists, psychologists and economists who consider everything from pension reform and elder abuse to the attitudes of different ethnic groups to geriatric rehabilitation, according to Globerson.
“We have no shortage of ethnic groups in the Negev,” she said. “There are immigrants from the Americas, Third World countries and various parts of the former Soviet Union, as well as a large Bedouin population. So each aspect of aging can be viewed through a variety of ethnic prisms. An approach that is appropriate for immigrants from North Africa in Negev development towns may not work with kibbutzniks from Argentina, or with Bedouin, whether urbanized or still living in tents.”
Globerson attributes much of the center’s success to the brainstorming that ensues when experts from various fields come together for discussion. A case in point, she said, involved medicines taken by the elderly.
“They usually swallow a wide assortment of pills, some provided by their HMO, others purchased at drug stores or given to them by friends or relatives. No one, however, takes into account the cumulative effects of all this medication. So we invited doctors, nurses, pharmacists, HMO administrators, directors of retirement homes and psychologists to discuss how to ensure that elderly patients take only the pills they need.”
The construction and operation of retirement homes was also the subject of multidisciplinary discussions by architects, medical doctors, nurses, caregivers, social workers and others.
“This was perhaps particularly important for the architects, who hadn’t previously understood the importance of such consultations,” said Globerson. “But they have learned.”
To illustrate her point, she cites a well-known architect who designed a handsome new retirement home and only afterward discovered that he had failed to take some relevant factors into consideration. Nurses and caregivers could have warned him, for instance, that the beautiful lawn designed for recreational activities was a mistake. “The residents absolutely refuse to stand on it for fear of losing their balance, falling down and breaking their bones,” she said.
At a recent meeting on nanotechnology, “a physicist told me how he happened to live in the same apartment house with a doctor when both were on a sabbatical several years ago. After they became friendly, the physician told him about a serious problem that was facing the elderly. It could be solved, the physicist suggested, by using an extremely small electronic device.”
At the research center, she said, “We encourage people from a variety of disciplines to tackle specific gerontological problems, and they inevitably learn from one another. This obviously doesn’t solve all the problems of aging, but we feel certain that our ‘matchmaking’ contributes to improving the quality of life of the elderly.”