Current Status and Future Perspectives of Medical Care for the Elderly in a Super-Aged Society

Abstract

In the super-aged society of Japan, the number of older people is expected to continue to increase. Accordingly, there is an urgent issue of how to control the growth of the number of older people requiring long-term care and to extend the healthy life expectancy in the future. One possible way is to prevent the incidence of frailty and sarcopenia. In addition, recent studies have shown that these pathological conditions are strongly associated with oral function. In order to enable older people to extend their healthy life expectancy, medical doctors and dentists need to work together to address this issue across Japan.