Home |  Elder Rights |  Health |  Pension Watch |  Rural Aging |  Armed Conflict |  Aging Watch at the UN  

  SEARCH SUBSCRIBE  
 

Mission  |  Contact Us  |  Internships  |    

        

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Boomer Health Debated

By Gary Rotstein, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

March 19, 2007 

University of Pennsylvania sociologist Beth Soldo, an early-wave baby boomer, wasn't seeking potentially ominous news about the health of her generation, but it was staring her in the face.

Studying data from the U.S. Health and Retirement Study, she and her colleagues found that people in their early to mid-50s were reporting more health problems than people that age had described previously.

Significantly, fewer such middle-aged people in 2004 than in 1992 rated their health highly. More of them rated pain as a regular problem. And a higher percentage had trouble climbing stairs or walking a few blocks.

The findings for the 51-56 age group ran counter to assumptions about the nation's health, especially that disability among the elderly was declining.

What's not clear in the wake of the report is whether there's an actual health decline among boomers born between 1948 and 1953 or just a decline in perceptions. The federal data are not correlated with any actual health evaluations.

"Boomers indicate they have relatively more difficulty with a range of everyday physical tasks, but they also report having more pain, more chronic conditions, more drinking and psychiatric problems, than their ... earlier counterparts," said Dr. Soldo's study, which was done for the National Bureau of Economic Research.

If any increased physical hardships among baby boomers prove long-lasting, it could be crippling for the future of Medicare costs, government financing of nursing home care, the nation's workforce needs and the care giving burdens placed on their children.

No one's saying there's evidence yet of any such doomsday scenario, but findings like Soldo's intrude upon consistently optimistic news about reductions in heart disease, better maintenance of chronic conditions and longer life expectancy.

"I spent a good bit of time trying to prove to myself that these (negative findings) were incorrect," said Soldo, the 58-year-old director of Penn's Population Aging Research Center , whose own health benefited from knee replacement surgery last year. "I will not swear on a Bible this is the gospel truth, but I will say these are credible and reasonable."

Of 5,000 people, age 51-56, answering the national health and retirement survey in 2004, exactly half the age group rated their health as either "excellent" or "very good." In 1992, 57 percent of people the same age rated their health that way. In 1998, 53 percent did so. The survey is done every six years.

Since publication two weeks ago of Soldo's report, called "Cross-Cohort Differences in Health on the Verge of Retirement," people who study health issues have suggested a number of theories to explain why those new to the age group might report more physical problems than their predecessors:

- The nation's increased obesity rates, which affect various health issues, are just now showing up as a factor in such data.

- Baby boomers may be less stoic than their predecessors, with higher standards for their health and more likelihood of complaining about maladies.

- Improvements in medical diagnoses and more widespread use of medications make people more aware of their own health issues and less likely to pronounce themselves in top shape.

-Increased stress is burdening the newer members of the age group, rendering them less likely to report vigorous health overall.

Dr. Richard Suzman, director of the National Institute on Aging Behavioral and Social Research Program, said most news about today's older adults has bred optimism that the 78 million baby boomers approaching old age won't overwhelm the health care system. He wants to see more research before making any assumption that such a huge population is either worse now, or will be worse in the future, than projected.

"If it's true, it's pretty important," he said.

He and others speculated that if there's actual health decline, obesity is a top suspect. Carrying excess weight contributes to the likelihood of diabetes and other disease, as well as to creating lethargy that can affect how people rate their health.

There is a nightmare scenario that some health analysts and economists have feared for years: the possibility that people who live longer because of medical advances will spend too many of those twilight years sick, bankrupting the system for everyone else.

One of the nation's leading analysts of aging health trends, Duke University research professor Kenneth Manton, sees no basis for such fears and nothing in Soldo's study to change his mind. His data from yet another source, the National Long-Term Care Survey, finds persistent drops in disability rates among the elderly since 1982.

The prevalence of chronic disability for people over age 65 stood at 19 percent in 2004-05, compared to 26.5 percent in 1982, and the improvement came at a higher rate in recent years than a decade or two ago, according to Manton's analysis. Because that data is connected to Medicare enrollees' medical records as well as their responses in interviews, Manton sees it as a more reliable indicator of how people are doing than self-reporting.

He also said it's possible that the negative effects of obesity are exaggerated, because Americans have been getting bigger in body size as a long-term trend at the same time their life expectancy and other indicators have improved. Also, adding pounds is one common side effect of stopping smoking, which, he said, is "still a net (health) gain."

"If there is a real increase in health problems, that's negative, but we have to be careful about it just being that medical care is better at detecting these things," Manton said. "I would have to have another five to 10 years of data to feel comfortable saying things are falling apart for people in the U.S. in their 50s."


Copyright © Global Action on Aging
Terms of Use  |  Privacy Policy  |  Contact Us