Yale study challenges aging myth as nearly half of older Americans get sharper, stronger, or both

Rather than depicting later life as a one-way slide, a new Yale study suggests many older Americans do better over time in areas people often expect them to worsen. 

The researchers found that among adults over 65, improvement in mental ability, physical function, or both was common enough to challenge the extremely widespread idea that aging automatically brings declining memory and mobility.

What happened?

Published in the peer-reviewed journal Geriatrics, the research followed more than 11,000 participants in the long-running Health and Retirement Study for as long as 12 years, ScienceDaily reported. 

The team assessed cognition with a global cognitive evaluation and used walking speed, a measure geriatricians often treat as a sign of overall health, to judge physical fitness. 

Over the study period, nearly half of the adults, 45% of the individuals 65 and older, improved in at least one of those areas, including roughly 32% who improved cognitively and 28% who improved physically. 

Some of the changes were large enough to be clinically significant, and when stable cognition was included alongside improvement, more than half avoided the deterioration many people associate with aging. 

The researchers said the gains were not limited to people recovering from illness or to those who began with lower function, since many of the participants who started at normal levels often improved over time. 

The findings suggest later life may offer more potential for growth than many people have been led to expect.

Why does it matter?

The results argue against viewing aging as a stage defined only by loss. Becca R. Levy, the study's lead author and a Yale School of Public Health professor of social and behavioral sciences, told ScienceDaily that the research shows that improvement in older age is more than a rare exception. 

She added that the team also found that older adults with more favorable views of aging were significantly more likely to improve in both walking speed and cognitive performance. 

From a public health perspective, the study suggests policy on aging should not be built solely around decline. 

The researchers explained the importance of the study, writing: "Our findings underscore the need to instill or magnify the positivity of age beliefs and to redefine aging so that it includes the possibility of improvement." 

They went on to explain that "We debunked the age belief that later life is a time of inevitable and universal decline. In doing so, a basis is provided for raising some older persons' expectations about their health, which might increase their self-efficacy, which could lead to greater engagement in health behaviors, which could contribute to further health improvement."

The scientists concluded the study by writing, "it is imperative that researchers and policymakers seek and deploy ways to amplify" the findings regarding positive age beliefs.

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