Ageing, Frailty and Mobility
An increasing number of Australians are living for several decades beyond their retirement. As such, up to 4 million Australians are predicted to be impacted by frailty by 2050, making it a major personal, public, societal and economic health issue for our community.
Experts from geriatric medicine, general practice, nursing, pharmacy, orthopaedics and rehabilitation medicine, together with researchers in knowledge translation, health economics, epidemiology and demography are working together to identify the prevalence, impact and distribution of frailty in the community and developing health care interventions that are appropriate and translatable to patient care.
Furthermore, researchers are working collaboratively to explore the nature of ageing and frailty in order to develop and deliver models of care - benefiting individuals and our entire community.
Researchers across the faculty are focused on:
- identifying the associations and long-term impact of frailty on health outcomes such as resilience, quality of life, susceptibility to disease complications and disability
- examining the impact of medications on frailty to determine if frailty is a driver of susceptibility to adverse drug events
- understanding the community environment and its contribution to frailty to enable design of new environments that support healthy ageing
- developing and testing frailty health economics models
- developing and testing new interventions and technologies to support, treat and reverse frailty in older people
- identifying early predictors of frailty to evaluate early interventions to minimise or avoid the progression of the individual to frailty
- developing and assessing technologies in hospital to monitor movement and behaviours of elderly patients at high risk of falling to minimise these events.
Our research centres and institutes working in this area
- Adelaide Geriatrics Training and Research with Aged Care (G-TRAC) Centre (Professor Renuka Visvanathan)
- Australian Research Centre for Population Oral Health (Professor David Brennan)
- Centre for Orthopaedic and Trauma Research (Professor Donald Howie)
- Centre of Research Excellence in Frailty and Healthy Ageing (Professor Renuka Visvanathan)
- Centre of Research Excellence in Translating Nutritional Science to Good Health (Professor Michael Horowitz)
- Dame Roma Mitchell Cancer Research Laboratories (Professor Wayne Tilley)
- North West Adelaide Health Study (Professor Robert Adams and Professor Anne Taylor)
- Wardliparingga Aboriginal Research Unit (Professor Alex Brown)
Our research groups working in this area
- Active Vision Lab (Associate Professor Anna Ma-Wyatt)
- Adelaide Spinal Research Group (Professor Brian Freeman)
- Bone Cell Biology Group (Professor Gerald Atkins)
- Clinical Glaucoma Research and Ophthalmic Research Laboratory (Professor Robert Casson)
- Cognition, Ageing and Neurodegenerative Disease Laboratory (Associate Professor Lyndsey Collins-Praino)
- Cognitive Neural Sciences Laboratory (Irina Baetu)
- Health, Disability and Lifespan Development Research Group (Professor Deborah Turnbull)
- Integrative Human Neurophysiology Laboratory (Dr Simran Sidhu)
- MAILES Longitudinal Male Ageing Study Research Group (Professor Gary Wittert)
- Primary Care and Health Services Research Group (Professor Nigel Stocks)
Lead researchers
For additional leads in this area of research, please contact Ageing, Frailty and Mobility researchers.
Interested in a postgraduate research degree?
We offer exciting opportunities for researchers at the honours, masters and PhD levels. Our research degrees are open to students from a broad range of backgrounds, and range from basic sciences to clinical research. If you are interested in human health, consider furthering your research career with us.