For everyone who worries about getting old, here is some good news: Old age is getting younger.
Older adults today show higher levels of cognitive function and well-being than adults of the same age 20 years ago. These are the findings of a collaborative study among several research institutions in Berlin, Germany, including the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, the Max Planck Institute for Human Development (MPIB), the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP), and the Charité-Universitätsmedizin Berlin. The study, financially supported by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research, reveals positive trends in human aging.
In the article, recently published in Psychology and Aging, Gerstorf et al. (2015) (PDF, 129KB) examine how sociocultural contexts shape individual functioning. Previous research has already revealed historically positive trends in the way people age. With the results of the current study, the research group can provide a comprehensive quantification of the nature and size of such trends in old age.
Gerstorf and colleagues used data of 708 Berliners, aged 60 and over, who were tested for cognitive functioning and rated their well-being in the context of the Berlin Aging Study II. The researchers compared these data with those from the Berlin Aging Study, the predecessor study from the early 1990s, and identified 161 "statistical twins," mostly consisting of one person of the same sex from each of the two studies who were as similar to each other in age and education as possible. Factors such as medically diagnosed illnesses were considered as well.
The average age of these comparison couples was 75 years (the youngest person was 65 years and the oldest was 89 years of age). To check for comparability, the researchers also took into account information from the SOEP study of the German Institute for Economic Research (DIW) Berlin, which has collected representative population data in Germany for 30 years.
On average, today's 75-year-olds are cognitively much fitter than the 75-year-olds of 20 years ago: Gerstorf et al. estimate that the cognitive performance of BASE-II participants was, on average, 19.61 years "younger" than the BASE cohort. At the same time, the current generation of 75-year-olds also reports higher levels of well-being, more positive affect, and fewer negative affects.
A possible explanation is seen in better physical fitness and higher levels of independence in old age. However, the researchers expect that these positive historical trends are attenuated at the end of life. During the final stage of life, the increase in good years of life is likely to give way to a rapid and marked drop in both cognition and well-being.
Other recent studies by Gerstorf and colleagues examining the last years of life of older people support this view.
- Cohort Differences in Cognitive Aging and Terminal Decline in the Seattle Longitudinal Study
- Cohorts Based on Decade of Death: No Evidence for Secular Trends Favoring Later Cohorts in Cognitive Aging and Terminal Decline in the AHEAD Study
- Historical Improvements in Well-Being Do Not Hold in Late Life: Birth- and Death-Year Cohorts in the United States and Germany
Citation:
Gerstorf, D., Hülür, G., Drewelies, J., Eibich, P., Duezel, S., Demuth, I., Ghisletta, P., Steinhagen-Thiessen, E., Wagner, G. G., Lindenberger, U. (2015). Secular changes in late-life cognition and well-being: Towards a long bright future with a short brisk ending? Psychology and Aging, 30(2), 301–310. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/pag0000016
Note: This article is in the Developmental Psychology topic area. View more articles in the Developmental Psychology topic area.