Two searches for elderly

When searching for information about elderly patients, there are two main possibilities.

The first possibility is that the requestor wants some articles about such-and-such disease in the elderly - a broad search. If you use "Aged" limit or MeSH to search this, you'll get masses of articles which look irrelevant, because the "Aged" MeSH in Medline is sometimes applied even if the study population only included one or two older patients. Therefore, I like to avoid the "Aged" MeSH altogether, and use keywords.

Here is my favourite search for cases like that:

elder*[tiab] OR geriatr*[tiab] OR gerontol*[tiab] OR "older adult"[tiab] OR "older adults"[tiab] OR "older person"[tiab] OR "older people"[tiab] OR "older patient"[tiab] OR "older patients"[tiab] OR "oldest old"[tiab] OR "late life"[tiab] OR "later life"[tiab] OR aging[tiab] OR ageing[tiab] OR octagenarian*[tiab] OR nonagenarian*[tiab]

The second possibility is that you have quite a specific topic, and have a relatively small set of search results to work with. You want a search that will find everything it can possibly find on elderly people, to combine with your already narrowed search.

Here's the one I use:

elder*[all fields] OR geriatr*[all fields] OR gerontol*[all fields] OR "older adult"[all fields] OR "older adults"[all fields] OR "older person"[all fields] OR "older people"[all fields] OR "older patient"[all fields] OR "older patients"[all fields] OR "oldest old"[all fields] OR "late life"[all fields] OR "later life"[all fields] OR aging[all fields] OR ageing[all fields] OR octagenarian*[all fields] OR nonagenarian*[all fields] OR "Aged"[Mesh] OR "Nursing Homes"[Mesh] OR "Homes for the Aged"[Mesh] OR "Assisted Living Facilities"[Mesh]

You'll note that I didn't search "aged" as a keyword, nor did I search senior*. If you search "aged" as a keyword, you get a lot of irrelevant results, such as "our study population included children aged 5-12". While the word "seniors" is used a lot in consumer health literature, it is hardly ever used in the biomedical literature. Instead, if you search senior* as a keyword, most of the results will be a quick mention of a senior attending physician or senior staff. I don't know if that is also true in a humanities database such as PsycInfo, so you may wish to experiment with the senior* keyword if you are using other databases.