- 51st Annual Scientific Meeting

The IGS held a very successful 51st Annual Scientific Meeting in September, at Adelaide and Meath Hospital in Dublin.

This meeting was associated with the 250th anniversary of the Meath Hospital (most famous as the base of Robert Graves and William Stokes), and the 10th anniversary of a dedicated geriatric medicine service in the Adelaide and Meath Hospital. We were fortunate to be able to use the excellent educational facilities of this new hospital. The hospital has chosen neurosciences and ageing as one of the four main components of its research strategy, and has been supportive of developments in specialist care for older people.
  
The IGS caters for the whole of Ireland and many of the 280 delegates were from Northern Ireland. The society is a multi-disciplinary organisation and many of the medical members are also members of the BGS. We have been fortunate to avoid parallel sessions up to now, and a wide range of topics were covered, from molecular biology to a fascinating study comparing the use of the mini-nutritional assessment in Belfast and Mysore, India.
 
Ageism and inequality was a particular theme of the meeting. The Presidential medal went to Dr E Odubanjo of the Dept of Pharmacology & Therapeutics, Trinity College, Dublin, for a study which looked at the impact of socio-economic prescribing in older people. The study capitalised on a recent change in Ireland, whereby free primary care was extended to all over 70. The incoming, previously private, older people were less likely to receive potentially harmful drugs such as thioridazine, to experience major polypharmacy, and were more likely to receive secondary prevention therapies such as statins and ACE inhibitors - definitely a challenging finding for the medical profession!
The poster prize was won by Dr Mike Watts and a team from Limerick and King’s College, for a randomised-controlled trial on pre-medication regimens in older people undergoing flexible fibreoptic bronchoscopy.

The Willie Bermingham Memorial Lecture on advances in the diagnosis and treatment of dementia was delivered by Dr Trey Sunderland, Director of the Mental Health and Ageing Programme of the National Institutes of Health, USA. This was a singularly good presentation, with thought-provoking insights into the potential for early treatment of Alzheimer’s disease. He also kept the audience on their toes throughout the lecture, by inviting commentary and estimates from them!

We were eased into the conference dinner by the strains of a string quartet. The speeches were short and sweet, presided over by outgoing IGS president, Dr John Lavan, known to many in the BGS as the Irish college representative on the SAC. The second day was given over to more presentations, while the focus of the business meeting was on the IAG and the ‘Madrid Declaration’ - the report of the Second World Assembly on Ageing. This document is felt to be sufficiently important that it has been reproduced in full in the abstract book, which was produced simultaneously with the meeting as Irish Journal of Medical Sciences, 2003, 3, Suppl 3.

Our incoming President is Dr Cillian Twomey, and next year we will meet in late September in Limerick, which has a training link with King’s College, London. Details of the meeting will be posted in the BGS Newsletter shortly. BGS members will of course be welcome, particularly after their acclimatisation experience at the BGS Spring meeting in Derry in April 2004! 
 

Desmond O’Neill
Secretary
Irish Gerontological Society