UMCG Healthy Ageing

The University Medical Center Groningen (UMCG) focuses on Healthy Ageing: growing older in a healthy and active way. The importance to society of this strong focus on healthy ageing is very clear: we are all living longer. But in most cases, those extra years that our longer life expectancy is giving us, are not spent in good health. The UMCG is the only university medical centre that has chosen to embed healthy ageing and all of its associated aspects into its core tasks on a permanent basis. Numerous questions are to be asked. For example, what are the factors that determine a healthy life? How do chronic diseases come into being? Can their occurrence in a particular phase of life be predicted? How will they progress? It is becoming clearer that many factors are at play in this issue, and they all affect one another. Why they cause illness in one person and not in another remains unclear. If we want to have a healthy population, then these will be the issues of the 21st century. In the coming years, the UMCG will work hard on all fronts to find the answers to these questions. In their mission to build on the future of health, the UMCG will focus on the processes of life, the lines of life and the consequences of the ageing process. Not only by means of fundamental scientific research, but also in clinical practice and in the organization of care and prevention.

In this workshop the concept of Healthy Ageing will be discussed thoroughly by means of several discussion topics.