Chennai: The state government is in the process of establishing a National Institute of Ageing (NIA) in Chennai. The Rs 150-crore Centrally assisted project is coming up on the premises of the King Institute of Preventive Medicine, which had its humble beginnings in 1899 as a vaccine lymph depot for manufacturing and supplying smallpox vaccine and was named after Lt Col. W. G. King, then Sanitary Commissioner to the Government of Madras, at Guindy.

It will be the second such institute in India after a similar one was set up at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AII MS), Delhi, and the first in south India. The institute will function under the Madras Medical College (MMC).

Work is currently on to establish a 200-bedded hospital on about 10 acres of land inside the King Institute and the NIA will also have several specialties linked to geriatric care and facilities to train doctors in Tamil Nadu and from the neighbouring states in geriatric care and support. “Even the doctors from district headquarter hospitals will be trained,” says Dr. J. Radhakrishnan, secretary to health and family welfare department. It will also facilitate research on the ageing population.

As per a report from the National Sample Survey, the percentage of the elderly who were physically mobile declined from about 94 per cent to 72 per cent in men aged 60-64 years and 65 to 63 per cent in women aged 80 years.

Prevalence of heart disease among the elderly was much higher in urban areas than in rural parts and about 64 per 1,000 elders in rural areas and 55 per 1,000 in urban areas suffered from one or more disability.

The most common disability among the aged was loco motor disability as 3 per cent of them suffered from it. The prevalence and incidence of diseases as well as hospitalisation rates were much higher in older people than in the rest of the total population.