The site describes the activities and projects of the Geriatric University Clinic of the University of Basel Medical School. It gives you the opportunity to meet the staff, learn about ongoing research projects focussing on nutrition and dementia, upcoming conferences and gives you an up-date of recent publications of the department. The Geriatric University Clinic pioneered the Memory Clinic in Switzerland and Europe.

Hannes B Staehelin (1937) graduated in Medicine at the University of Basel in 1964. He trained in clinical Medicine at the Universitiy of Basel. From 1966 to 1969 he worked as post-doctoral fellow at the CNS Research Laboratory of Roche Pharmaceutical, subsequently at the Surgical Research Laboratory of the Loma Linda Medical School California. From Loma Linda he moved to the Donner Laboratory of Medical Physics at the UC Berkeley. In fall of 1969 He moved he took a residency in internal medicine at the department of medicine of the University of Basel.

His training in metabolic research soon led him into collaboration with the team of the Basel Study on Risk Factors and Cardiovascular Disease. In the late seventies he was among the first to study the impact of antioxidants on cancer and cardiovascular disease. In 1977 he was nominated head of the Geriatric Clinic at the University Hospital.

Realizing that good prevention of cardiovascular diseases and cancer inevitably increases the risk of age associated mental impairment Staehelin initiated an intensive collaboration with the department of Neuropathology and Clinical Psychology in order to elucidate factors leading to or preventing from mental decline with advancing age.

With the help of Sandoz Pharmaceutical Company he could open in 1986 the first Memory Clinic in Europe with a comprehensive diagnostic and therapeutic approach. Since then the Basel Memory Clinic was copied many times.

Clinical experience and the interest in metabolism lead Staehelin to investigate the impact of malnutrtion in old age. Thus clinical research is devoted to micronutrient intake and nutritional status.

Hannes B. Staehelin is currently president of the Novartis Foundation for Gerontology. He is together with J.-P. Michel, Sir John Grimley Evans, B. Steen and S Duursma founder of the European Academy for Medicine of Aging (EAMA) and he serves on a number of boards related to Geriatrics and Nutrition.