TV series set to teach elderly people about health

China's first TV series popularizing health information for the elderly premiered in Shanghai on Wednesday.

The 10-episode series, which takes a lighthearted approach, focuses on helping the elderly understand common acute and severe threats to health, as well as chronic diseases in a scientific way, and also teaches them how to take precautions just in case.

The show is the joint creation of Huashan Hospital Affiliated with Fudan University and the Shanghai Theatre Academy and is titled Ms Kang and Her Elderly Neighbors. The series follows the lead character, a retired head nurse from a geriatrics department with plentiful experience in care, as she and her elderly neighbors help one another deal with diseases.

Huashan Hospital said that the series includes information on 10 common health issues and diseases that affect the elderly, including accidental falls, malnutrition, pain in the back and legs, periarthritis of the shoulder, osteoporosis, hypertension, diabetes, osteoarthritis, myocardial infarction, stroke, senile syndrome and Alzheimer's disease.

Nie Yaliang, who studied at the Shanghai Theatre Academy in the 1960s, plays the director of a hospital rehabilitation department in the series, in which many of the actors and actresses are seniors aged 75 on average. He said he learned a lot about health threats to the elderly and hoped that the knowledge would be of benefit to people.

"The stories are designed to help the audience, especially the elderly and their families, clearly understand clinical signs, diagnosis and treatment processes, as well as teaching them about common chronic diseases affecting the elderly," said Zhou Houguang, a senior physician at the geriatrics department of Huashan Hospital.

"We also call on society to provide better care to the elderly. In the stories, we see that some elderly people may experience challenges to their quality of everyday life, interpersonal relationships, and psychology as a result of either acute or chronic disease," he said.

While an aging society is an issue for a number of countries, it is a mounting issue in China. The United Nations forecasts that the number of elderly citizens in the country will rise to 280 million in 2025, accounting for one-fifth of the population. By 2050, that number will rise to 480 million, or 37 percent of the country's total population.

"With the continuous rise in life expectancy, the high incidence of chronic disease poses a major challenge in an aging society. More than 180 million elderly people currently suffer from chronic disease, and 75 percent suffer from more than one," said Zhou.

The Huashan Hospital National Geriatric Clinical Medial Research Center was established in 2016. It has been involved in clinical research and is trying to develop solutions to diseases of the nervous system and limb injuries among the elderly, the prevention and treatment of geriatric comorbidity and debilitation, as well as rates of elderly infection and the rational use of antibiotics.