Social environment and healthy ageing

With growing numbers of people living to older ages, age-related diseases have become an increasing challenge for societies everywhere. Many age-related diseases however, should rather be considered lifestyle related diseases since lifestyle plays an important role in the etiology and the treatment of cardiovascular disease, obesity, type ۲I diabetes and many forms of cancer. This has led to a large body of literature investigating the possibility to change people’s lifestyle. Interventions with, for example, physiotherapists that engage in daily physical activity with older people have shown substantial benefits, even reversing type ۲ diabetes and some characteristics of the ageing process (۱,۲). Most lifestyle interventions, however, struggle to achieve sustained, long-term behavioural change (۳,۴). Few individuals can maintain the effort to adopt a new diet or exercise regime themselves, without intensive coaching by professionals. These interventions are therefore expensive and this hinders the widespread and continued delivery to the growing number of older people with unhealthy lifestyle and (risk for) age-related disease. Therefore, it is important to explore novel sustainable and cost-effective methods for lifestyle interventions to combat the burden of age-related disease in ageing societies. One often overlooked influence on the health behaviour of older people is the effect of the social environment. We believe that peer coaching, in which older people coach each other in achieving lifestyle changes, is such a promising method to deliver health benefits in a sustainable, scalable way.