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A new study by scientists at Yale University suggests that older individuals can and do \u2018improve,\u2019 in all the senses of that word, over time.<\/p>\n
Analyzing the results of a large study of older Americans that ran for a decade, a key data point was that the individual\u2019s mindset toward aging plays a major part in their success.<\/p>\n
If they believed aging was a process of decline, they declined. If they believed aging was a process of refinement, they improved.<\/p>\n
Lead author Dr. Becca R. Levy, PhD, a professor of social and behavioral sciences at the Yale School of Public Health (YSPH) found that nearly half of adults aged 65 and older showed measurable improvement in cognitive function, physical function, or both, over time.<\/p>\n
The improvements were not limited to a small group of exceptional individuals and, notably, were linked to a powerful but often overlooked factor: how people think about aging itself.<\/p>\n
\u201cMany people equate aging with an inevitable and continuous loss of physical and cognitive abilities,\u201d said<\/a> Dr. Levy, an international expert on psychosocial determinants of aging health. \u201cWhat we found is that improvement in later life is not rare, it\u2019s common, and it should be included in our understanding of the aging process.\u201d<\/p>\n The findings are published<\/a> in the journal Geriatrics.<\/p>\n For the study, the researchers followed more than 11,000 participants in the Health and Retirement Study, a federally supported longitudinal survey of older Americans. The research team tracked changes in cognition using a global performance assessment, and physical function using walking speed\u2014often described by geriatricians as a \u201cvital sign\u201d because of its strong links to disability, hospitalization, and mortality.<\/p>\n Over a follow-up period of up to 12 years, 45% of participants improved in at least one of the two domains, according to the study. About 32% improved cognitively, 28% improved physically, and many experienced gains that exceeded thresholds considered clinically meaningful.<\/p>\n When participants whose cognitive scores remained stable over that period (rather than declining) were included, more than half defied the stereotype of inevitable deterioration in cognition.<\/p>\n \u201cWhat\u2019s striking is that these gains disappear when you only look at averages,\u201d said Dr. Levy, author of the book Breaking the Age Code: How Your Beliefs About Aging Determine How Long & How Well You Live<\/a>.<\/p>\n \u201cIf you average everyone together, you see decline,\u201d Dr. Levy continued. \u201cBut when you look at individual trajectories, you uncover a very different story. A meaningful percentage of the older participants that we studied got better.\u201d<\/p>\n As for why, Levy and her co-authors hypothesized that an important factor could be participants had assimilated more positive or more negative views about aging by the start of the study. In support of this hypothesis, they found that those with more positive age beliefs were significantly more likely to show improvements in both cognition and walking speed, even after accounting for factors such as age, sex, education, chronic disease, depression, and length of follow-up.<\/p>\n
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