Older people's charity Age Concern today joined an outcry against proposals to refuse patients NHS treatment on the grounds of their age or unhealthy lifestyle.

The Patients Association has already condemned the idea put forward by the National Institute for health and Clinical Excellence (Nice) as "disastrous", and has threatened to challenge Nice in court if the proposal gets the go-ahead following a public consultation which closes at the end of next month.

Age Concern today condemned the idea and urged Nice to think again.

The charity said older people are already discriminated against in the NHS because of their age - routine breast screening stops for women at the age of 70, and it claims many mental health services are unavailable once people reach 65.

Gordon Lishman, Age Concern's director general, said: "These draft guidelines are muddled and if applied could be a real step backwards in the fight against ageism. We still have a long way to go to scrap unfair practice suffered by older people in the NHS.

"Everyone should have the right to treatment according to what they need as individuals, never on the sole basis of their date of birth," he said.

The proposal for age to influence a patient's right to treatment appears in a Nice consultation document published last month, which for the first time looks at which social values should underpin its decisions when drawing up national clinical guidelines.

The report recommended that all patients should be treated equally regardless of age, gender, race or socio-economic status.

But it suggested that the exception to this principle should apply "where age is an indicator of benefit or risk". In these cases "age discrimination is appropriate".

The second exception should occur if a patient's condition is "self-inflicted", and the "self inflicted causes of the condition influences the likely outcome of the use of the intervention", it proposed.

The Nice chairman, Sir Michael Rawlins, accepted that the recommendations were controversial when the report was launched but said: "Somewhere along the line somebody has got to bite the bullet on this."

He said linking treatment to whether the condition was "self-inflicted" could apply to cases where patients were smokers or were obese. Patients had to take some responsibility for their own health, he said.

But he accepted there would be exceptions to this rule; for example he said he would not expect a smoker to be denied a heart bypass operation.

Imelda Redmond, chief executive of Carers UK, which represents six million carers in the UK, said: "Our concern is that by rationing treatment for older people it will leave carers to pick up the tab.

"If age is an indicator of benefit or risk that should be explained to the patient and patients should be able to make an informed choice about their treatment. The message from Nice is wrong."

Consultation on the Nice proposals finishes on June 30 with a decision to follow at a later date.