To see and then to act, that is the challenge

Excerpt

The burden of chronic diseases in Europe will inevitably grow in the nearby future for the reasons outlined in the paper by Brennan et al. [1] in this issue. The life expectation is rapidly improving, but leaving an increasing proportion of those living longer with these diseases, and often with several diseases at the same time (multi-morbidity), either by co-incidence or because of some mutual synergistic relationships between them. In addition to the obvious suffering of the many older people, it puts huge logistic and economic challenges on the health care systems and hence to the societies in general. Moreover, there are already by now considerable disparities between and also within countries in the distributions of these health problems, which by themselves give rise to political tensions. …