| Medication of the elderly must be tailored, says new report | Posted on 09/10/2009 in Medical Government/ NHS related news Care of the elderly should be treated as a separate topic to medication for younger people, since older patients respond differently to vaccine therapy, according to new research.
The paper, published in Cancer Immunology and Immunotherapy, looked at how the ageing of a person's immune system can restrict the efficiency of a vaccine.
Dr Lustgarten, from the Mayo Clinic College of Medicine, pointed out that the goal is now to see what sort of strategies will work on older people and how to boost their immune systems and achieve better results with medication.
He said: "The immune system of the elderly is very different from the young and it is difficult to extrapolate results obtained in the young for use in the old."
His research focused on the development of treatment of cancerous tumours, which, in younger people, will normally have the support of a strong immune system to aid the effectiveness of drugs.
Recent research presented in the American Journal of Physiology indicated that a good indication of how stiff an older person's arteries are can be measured by how far they can reach beyond their toes from a seated position.
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