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8 - Aging and disease

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 August 2009

By
Thomas T. Perls
Edited by
Alan Wright  and
Nicholas Hastie
Alan Wright
Affiliation:
MRC Human Genetics Unit, Edinburgh
Nicholas Hastie
Affiliation:
MRC Human Genetics Unit, Edinburgh
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Summary

Is achieving extreme old age worthwhile? The centenarian phenotype

Average life expectancy has markedly increased over the past century. In 1900 average life expectancy was 46 years and in the United States it is currently almost 79 years. The age 85+ group is the fastest growing segment of our population and within that group, the number of centenarians is growing even faster. Whether mortality declines have been accompanied by health improvements among the elderly has been a matter of debate. Some authors have suggested that mortality declines have led to increased prevalence of frailty among older survivors because treatment of existing diseases simply postpones death to older ages (Gruenberg, 1977; Kramer, 1983; Olshansky and Ault, 1986), while others suggest that mortality declines have led to a compression of morbidity (Fries, 1980). Early US evidence from the 1970s was generally consistent with the idea that health among the elderly had deteriorated (Crimmins and Ingegneri, 1993; Verbrugge, 1984), while more recent evidence provides a somewhat more optimistic view (Freedman and Soldo, 1994; Manton et al., 1997). Changes in disability prevalence over time, however, have varied by type and severity and by the data source used for trend analyses (Waidmann and Manton, 1998).

Centenarians studied by Hitt et al. appear to fit the pattern of postponement of disability to very advanced ages. In a population-based sample, it was observed that 90% of centenarians were independently functioning at age 92 (Hitt et al., 1999).

Type
Chapter
Information
Genes and Common Diseases
Genetics in Modern Medicine
 , pp. 132 - 141
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2007

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