Monday, December 13, 2010
We Spend More Time Sick Now Than A Decade Ago
Increased life expectancy in the United States has not been accompanied by more years of perfect health, reveals new research published in the December issue of the Journal of Gerontology.
Indeed, a 20-year-old today can expect to live one less healthy year over his or her lifespan than a 20-year-old a decade ago, even though life expectancy has grown.
From 1970 to 2005, the probability of a 65-year-old surviving to age 85 doubled, from about a 20 percent chance to a 40 percent chance. Many researchers presumed that the same forces allowing people to live longer, including better health behaviors and medical advances, would also delay the onset of disease and allow people to spend fewer years of their lives with debilitating illness.
But new research from Eileen Crimmins, AARP Chair in Gerontology at the University of Southern California, and Hiram Beltrán-Sánchez, a postdoctoral fellow at the Andrus Gerontology Center at USC, shows that average “morbidity,” or, the period of life spend with serious disease or loss of functional mobility, has actually increased in the last few decades.
“We have always assumed that each generation will be healthier and longer lived than the prior one,” Crimmins explained. “However, the compression of morbidity may be as illusory as immortality.”
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