Healthy old age

摘要

Do longer lives mean that growing numbers of us will spend more time in a state of high-cost dependency? Evidence from one elderly cohort suggests that excessive levels of disability are far from inevitable. Birthdays are a sign of survival: the more you have, the longer you have lived. But survival is not the same thing as health. One of the major concerns, as life expectancies around the world continue to climb, is whether longer life means, on average, a longer period spent suffering from age-related frailty, disability and disease. A study from Denmark, just published by Christensen et al. in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, reassuringly shows that it is not necessarily so. Christensen et al. analysed longitudinal data from 2,262 individuals in the Danish population born in 1905 who were still alive in 1998 (about two-thirds of the surviving total), in order to find out whether living to an exceptional age brought with it a very high risk of disability and dependency.