Articles on elderly in Serbian medical journals

Abstract

Introduction Population aging is a feature of all countries in the world. According to statistics, the Republic of Serbia is one of the countries with the majority of the elderly. Taking this into account, are articles on the elderly well represented in domestic medical journals? Objective The aim of the paper was to determine whether there was a sufficient number of articles on the elderly in domestic medical journals. Methods The articles on the elderly were searched using search engines in domestic and foreign medical journals for the last 5 years compared with the number of articles on children in the same publications for the same period. Results In the Serbian Citation Index, 11 articles on the topic of the elderly, and 487 on children were registered. In Srpski arhiv za celokupno lekarstvo, there was registered only one article on the topic of the elderly, and 30 on children. In Vojnosanitetski pregled, 2 articles on the elderly and 13 on children were registered (p<0001). For the last five years, in the New England Journal of Medicine, there were 593 articles on the elderly and 759 articles on children; in the JAMA, there were 63 articles on the elderly and 303 articles on children; and in The Lancet, in the last five years, 46 articles on the elderly and 148 articles on children were published. Conclusion The themes of the elderly were rarely represented in Serbian medical journals. This has reduced the interest of physicians in medical problems of this growing population of patients and further sent them away from making standards in the diagnosis and treatment of the elderly.

Keywords

• elderly
• children
• representation
• journal