Geriatrics Geriatrics

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Introduction

With improvements in modern medicine and increased life span, it is important that all clinicians are equipped to care for older adults. While aging is not a disease, normal physiologic changes that accompany aging make older adults more vulnerable to many conditions. Along with medical conditions, functional status and psychosocial supports should be considered when caring for this population.

Following a report by the Institute of Medicine in the 1970s outlining the needs of the elderly population, the field of geriatrics was born. Geriatric care requires interprofessional collaboration. To understand what a geriatrician does, one needs to think of the geriatric 5Ms:

  • Mind: mentation, dementia, delirium, depression
  • Mobility: impaired gait and balance; fall-injury prevention
  • Medications: polypharmacy, deprescribing; optimal prescribing; adverse medication effects and medication burden
  • Multicomplexity: multimorbidity; complex biopsychosocial situations
  • Matters most: each individual’s own meaningful health-outcome goals and care preferences

The topics covered are organized as follows:

Other important topics related to geriatrics are covered in the following rotation guides:

 

This rotation guide was developed by a collaborative team of contributors, including:

Writers: Amanda Fernandes, MD; Ramya Ramaswami MBBS MRCP(UK) MPH; Michael Mi, MD; James Yeh, MD (NEJM Fellows)
Peer Reviewers: Michelle Jose-Kampfner, MD; Mousumi Sircar, MD; and Bruce Bonnell, MD
Section Expert: Sarah Berry, MD
Senior Editor: Ole-Petter Hamnvik, MB BCh BAO, MMSc
Last Updated: March 2020 by Amanda Fernandes, MD

  • Sarah Berry, MD, MPH's avatar
    Sarah Berry, MD, MPH

    Sarah D. Berry, MD, MPH, is a geriatrician and clinical researcher at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and Hebrew SeniorLife. She completed her internal medicine residency at the University of Utah before her geriatric fellowship at BIDMC. She is currently an Assistant Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School and the Program Director for the Harvard Multicampus Geriatric Medicine Fellowship Program.

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