QuickStats: Life Expectancy and Years Free of Activity Limitations,* by Race and Sex --- United States, 2006

* Estimates are based on data from the National Vital Statistics System and the National Health Interview Survey (NHIS). NHIS collects information in household interviews of a sample of the civilian noninstitutionalized U.S. population. Expected years free from activity limitations combines estimates of total life expectancy and prevalence rates of activity limitations associated with chronic conditions, which are determined from responses to several questions in the NHIS Family Core component. Questions and methods used to compute total life expectancy and expected years free of activity limitations are included in the source report.

In 2006, total life expectancy was greater for females than males and for whites than for blacks. Total life expectancy ranged from 80.6 years for white females and 76.5 years for black females to 75.7 years for white males and 69.5 years for black males. Expected years free of activity limitations was greatest for white females (69.1 years), followed by white males (65.7 years), black females (63.4 years), and black males (59.3 years).

Source: Molla MT, Madans JH. Life expectancy free of chronic condition-induced activity limitations among white and black Americans, 2000--2006. National Center for Health Statistics. Vital Health Stat 2010;3(34). Available at http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/series/sr_03/sr03_034.pdf .

Study: Slashing Air Pollution Could Add Two Years to Your Life — Autoblog Green

The three-year probe, called Aphekom and funded by the European Union (EU), examined 25 cities in 12 EU countries and found that fine particulates emitted from the exhaust of vehicles create significant health problems and are associated with the loss of up to 19,000 lives per year throughout Europe. In addition, the study claims that curbing roadside air pollution could save European cities 31.5 billion euros ($43.4 billion U.S. at the current exchange rate) in health-related costs and missed work, while also increasing life expectancy by nearly two years.
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Caring For Our Brains

As the average life span becomes longer, dementia becomes more common. Swedish scientist Laura Fratiglioni has shown that everyone can minimize his or her risk of being affected. Factors from blood pressure and weight to the degree of physical and mental activity can influence cognitive functioning as one gets older.

The lengthening of the average life span in the population has caused an increase in the prevalence of aging related disorders, one of which is cognitive impairment and dementia. An expert panel estimates that worldwide more than 24 million people are affected by dementia, most suffering from Alzheimer's disease. In the more developed countries, 70 percent of the persons with dementia are 75 years or older. Age is the greatest risk factor for developing dementia. But there is growing evidence that the strong association with increasing age can be, at least partially, explained by a life course cumulative exposure to different risk factors.

Laura Fratiglioni's research group at Karolinska Institutet is a leader in identifying the risk factors that lie behind developing dementia and using this knowledge to develop possible preventative strategies. The group's research has shown that the risk is partly determined by an individual genetic susceptibility, and that active involvement in mental, physical and social activities can delay the onset of dementia by preserving cognitive functions. Further education early in life has a protective effect, and the group's research has shown that it is never too late to get started.

"The brain, just as other parts of the body, requires stimulation and exercise in order to continue to function. Elderly people with an active life - mentally, physically and socially - run a lower risk of developing dementia, and it doesn't matter what the particular activities are", says Professor Laura Fratiglioni.

Laura Fratiglioni's research has shown that physical factors are also significant. Not only high and low blood pressure, but also diabetes and obesity when middle-aged increase the risk of developing dementia after the age of 70. "What is good for the heart is good for the brain", she says.

Knowledge about risk factors and how to protect the brain from dementia is based on observational studies in which scientists have discovered statistical correlations in the population. Scientists in other current studies that are carried out in Europe are investigating what happens when a large number of study participants are given special help to better control vascular risk factors and to stimulate social, physical and mental activities. which should, at least, lead to a delay of dementia onset.

"You could say that we are progressing from observation to experiment. This means that in a few years we will know more about which strategies are most effective in preventing neurodegenerative disorders", says Laura Fratiglioni.

Source:
Sabina Bossi
Karolinska Institutet

Longer Lives “a Call to Action” for the 21st Century

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By Mark Gorman

Is the world beginning to take notice of global ageing?

The message that extended life expectancy, falling fertility rates and accelerating ageing are now truly global phenomena seems to be getting a wider hearing, and in the past few months a number of different voices have been raised on the issue.

Global ageing vs. global economy

In an article in the December 2010 edition of "Foreign Affairs" for example, Nicholas Eberstadt writes: "It is apparent that the future global economy will not be able to rely on the kind of demographic inputs that helped fuel growth in the era before the current global recession".

Rapid population ageing, he argues, represents an almost entirely undiscounted long-term risk for the world's emerging countries.

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Wonk Room » Sen. Shelby: Raising The Social Security Retirement Age Is A ‘Positive Thing’

By Pat Garofalo

A number of Republican lawmakers have recently trotted out the reasons that they favor raising the retirement age for Social Security (which is essentially the most regressive change would-be Social Security reformers could make). Gov. Mitch Daniels (R-IN) said he favored increasing it because young people will start living to 100 by “replacing body parts like we do tires,” while Gov. Tim Pawlenty (R-MN) said that he simply wants to “correlate your retirement…to life expectancy.”

These reasons for suggesting yet another increase in the retirement age, which was also raised in 1983, are quite bad. But according to another advocate, Sen. Richard Shelby (R-AL), raising the retirement age to “perhaps 70 or 72″ is actually a “positive thing,” because people are living longer and are more productive:

“To sit here and tell you it’s (Social Security) going to be actuarially sound for all the baby boomers and young people, that’s nonsense,” Shelby said, adding that the Social Security tax would have to be doubled or tripled to fully fund the system for younger people…“But,” he said, “we can do some positive things to prolong Social Security … will we is a different question, isn’t it?”

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U.S. Life Expectancy Declines : Discovery News

Life expectancy has dropped slightly for all Americans except for black men, who gained around two and a half months in longevity, according to a recent report.

Data gathered by the National Center for Health Statistics showed that life expectancy for most American men was 75.3 years in 2008, down by one-tenth of a year from 2007.

Women also saw a drop in the number of years they can expect to live, from 80.4 years to 80.3 years, the data show.

Black men, on the other hand, bucked the trend and reached a record-high life expectancy of 70.2 years in 2008, up by 0.2 years compared to 2007.

Heart disease remained the leading cause of death in the United States, followed by cancer, chronic lower respiratory diseases, stroke and accidental injury.

The sixth leading cause of death was Alzheimer's disease, one of six diseases or causes for which the age-adjusted death rate increased significantly, the study says.

A study released in October said the United States ranked 49th in the world for male and female life expectancy, a precipitous drop from the fifth place it held in 1950.
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In Sickness and in Health - NYTimes.com

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By PAULA SPAN

There are few good housing options for elderly couples when one spouse is ill and the other is well.

“These are the hardest kind of situations we deal with,” said Emily Saltz of Elder Resources, a veteran geriatric care manager in greater Boston. “We don’t have good options for couples with differing health status.”

Yet almost every elderly couple will eventually fall into that category, she pointed out. Who ages at exactly the same rate?

It’s yet another quandary caused by lengthening life spans; more people over 60 are married, remarried or cohabiting than decades ago, when more were widowed. Ms. Saltz finds it no longer uncommon to work with couples in their 90s. Most want very much to continue living together. But it’s not easy.

Questions of how and where to live are complicated by the conviction that one spouse should shoulder the burden, sometimes the entire burden, of caring for the other. They see that as a duty, even as research repeatedly underscores the risks.

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Walking Speed and Survival Connected

Woman among world's oldest dies at 112 in Fla.

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Florida's oldest resident, a 112-year-old woman counted among the world's 25 oldest people by a research group, has died.

Onie Ponder of Ocala died Friday morning. Her son, Carswell Ponder, says his mother died after a brief bout with pneumonia.

According to the Los Angeles-based Gerontology Research Group, Onie Ponder had been the oldest person in Florida and one of the 25 oldest people in the world. She was born Sept. 3, 1898.
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Living Longer Comes With a Physical Cost - NYTimes.com

Image via CrunchBaseBy NICHOLAS BAKALAR

Americans are living longer, but those added years are more likely to be a time of disease and disability.

An analysis of government data has found that while life expectancy has steadily increased over the past decade, the prevalence of heart disease, stroke, cancer and diabetes has also increased, and disability has grown as well.

For example, in 1998 about 16 percent of men in their 70s had a mobility problem — that is, they failed one of four commonly used physical tests. By 2006, almost 25 percent failed at least one.

Writing in the January issue of The Journal of Gerontology B, the authors conclude that people live longer not because they are less likely to get sick, but because they survive longer with disease.
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Odds Skew Against Investors in Bets on Strangers' Lives - WSJ.com

By MARK MAREMONT And LESLIE SCISM

In the summer of 2005, a firm called Life Partners Holdings Inc. said Marvin Aslett, an Idaho rancher 79 years old, had two to four years to live.

It didn't make this estimate on his behalf but for its customers. The company arranges to buy life-insurance policies from people like Mr. Aslett and sells fractional interests to investors, who collect the death benefits when the insured people die.

The investors in a $2 million policy on Mr. Aslett's life would have made a tidy return had he died as projected. But more than five years later, the rancher, now 84, says he runs on a treadmill, lifts weights and chops wood, adding that all of his grandparents lived well into their 90s.

"I'm healthy as a horse," he says. "There's going to be a lot of disappointed investors."

Life Partners, a fast-growing company in Waco, Texas, has made large fees from its life-insurance transactions while often significantly underestimating the life expectancies
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Retirement age strikes hit France again | BreakingNews.ie

Image by BWJones via FlickrFrench commuters squeezed on to limited public transport and fought for rare parking spots today as a second round of strikes against President Nicolas Sarkozy's plan to raise the retirement age from 60 to 62 hobbled trains, planes and schools across France.

Union leaders are hoping for a massive show of popular discontent at the 232 demonstrations planned throughout the country, and are aiming to top the turnout of September 7, when at least 1.1 million people took to the streets to protest against the planned overhaul of the deficit-burdened pension system.

As baby boomers reach retirement age and life expectancy increases, the government insists it is necessary to raise the retirement age so the pension system can break even by 2018.
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Lookin' Good In Those Genes | Medicare Solutions Blog

Image via WikipediaBy Lucy Dylan

People all over the world are living longer. Worldwide, few people reach the age of 100, and those who do are often celebrated for their longevity. Only one out of every six thousand people will blow out the candles on their 100^th birthday cake. Even fewer people (one out of every seven million) have lived beyond age 100 into their 110s or 120s. Currently, the United States and Japan are home to the largest numbers of people aged 100 or older world wide.

But how can you live such a long life?
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If We Raise The Retirement Age, Millions More Will Die Without Retiring | The Seminal

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By: Bill Egnor

The bland and faux tanned Minority Leader thinks that the issue is that people are living longer and so we have to pay Social Security benefits for a longer period of time, thus making it too expensive. So what is the simple (minded) solution? Raise the age that people can stop working. This way there is less time between our elderly citizens leaving the workforce and dying. That will keep the costs down.


Leaving aside the fact that there is enough money to pay for the Social Security of our citizens because the workers of today pay into the system that pays for the benefits of the retired, this is an incredibly bad idea. It is true that life expectancy has increased in the 65 years since the program was put into place, with both men and women increasing their life expectancy by about 15 years.

The thing about life expectancy is that it is an average number and that average can be skewed upward by a few outliers who live an extremely long time. Using an average number like life expectancy to determine the appropriate age to retire means that millions of citizens will never reach that age and qualify for Social Security. Another issue is the nature of work.

While it might be achievable for someone who works in an office to work all through their 60’s not every job or even trade is sitting at a computer. Many of the jobs that allow non-college graduates to earn a good living and raise a family are physically demanding. Working in a hot factory, climbing electrical poles, driving buses, cleaning hotel rooms are all jobs that someone in their 60’s are not going to be as able to do. Take a look around at the people you know in their mid or late 60’s. They may be in great health but that does not mean most of them can spend the day in physically demanding labor, day after day after day.

I don’t know about you, but I don’t let anyone over 60 on a high ladder if I can possibly help it. It is not that they are more likely to fall (though vertigo becomes more of a problem as we age) but that the consequences of such a fall are far more serious to them than someone in their 20’s or 40’s. Living longer does not automatically mean that you have an extended ability to do the same kind of work as you did in the prime of your life. In fact there is very little evidence that we are significantly stronger as a people in our 60’s and 70’s and beyond than previous generations. It is the medicines and medical technology that we have today which is extending our lives, not some change in the way our bodies age. Add this to the issue that people with more physically demanding jobs are the ones most likely to have small injuries that add up over time and you can see how raising the eligibility age for Social Security is a really bad idea.

Yes, there is always going to be a segment of the population which will be strong and fit all through their 60’s. They have existed in our populations for a long time, but they are not the norm, they are at the far right of the normal distribution. The vast majority of people are going to become more and more fragile with age. Sure we can replace hips and knees, but while that makes people more mobile it does not make them the same as when they were younger.

We should also never lose sight of exactly why the radical Republicans want to monkey with Social Security in the first place. They want to be able to reduce the amount of taxes paid to by citizens, no matter what that money pays for. They have been unmasked in terms of their claim of being the party of fiscal responsibility. No matter what they say, they are not really interested in doing the things it takes to keep the United States financially sound. If they were they would be talking about raising taxes, the way their Saint Ronald Regan did.

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Study Explores Genetics of Extreme Longevity from MedPage Today

Overweight' Adults Age 70 Or Older Are Less Likely To Die Over A 10 Year Period Than Those Of 'Normal' Weight

from Medical News Today

Adults aged over 70 years who are classified as overweight are less likely to die over a ten year period than adults who are in the 'normal' weight range, according to a new study published today in the Journal of The American Geriatrics Society.
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• Being Fat May Not Be All Bad -- If You're 70 (time.com)
• 'Overweight' Older People May Live Longer (inquisitr.com)
• Santa's OK! Over 70 and overweight possibly a good idea. (weightymatters.ca)

Cartilage Repair Can Improve Life, Ease Burden On Health Services

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from Medical News Today

Osteoarthritis (OA) is one of the ten most disabling diseases in the developed world and is set to become more of a financial burden on health services as average life expectancy increases.

OA is the most common form of arthritis, affecting nearly 27 million Americans or 12.1% of the adult population of the United States, according to Laurence et al.¹ A 2001 study showed that the disease costs US health services about $89.1 billion,2 and indirect costs relating to wages and productivity losses and unplanned home care averaged $4603 per person.3

In a review for F1000 Medicine Reports, Yves Henrotin and Jean-Emile Dubuc examine the range of therapies currently on offer for repairing cartilaginous tissue. They also consider how recent technological developments could affect the treatment of OA in elderly populations.

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QuickStats: Average Life Expectancy at Birth, by Race and Sex --- United States, 2000, 2006, and 2007*

In 2007, the average life expectancy at birth for persons born in the United States was 77.9 years, an increase of 1.1 years from 2000 and an increase of 0.2 years from 2006. For black males and females, life expectancy increased by approximately 2 years from 2000 to 2007 and 0.5 years from 2006 to 2007. For white males and females, increases in life expectancy were smaller. Although the gap in life expectancy between white and black populations is narrowing, life expectancy for white males in 2007 (75.8 years) was 5.6 years greater than for black males (70.2) and 3.7 years greater for white females (80.7) than black females (77.0).
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Exercise Benefits Even the Oldest Old - Forbes.com

The researchers found that 53.4 percent of participants were physically active at age 70, 76.9 percent at age 77, and 64 percent at age 85. Compared to those who were sedentary, physically active people were 12 percent less likely to die between ages 70 and 78, 15 percent less likely to die between ages 78 and 85, and 17 percent less likely to die between ages 85 and 88.

Physically active participants also experienced fewer declines in their ability to perform daily tasks, were more likely to be able to live independently, and were less likely to be lonely and to rate their health as poor.

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Life Expectancy in U.S. Hits a New High - Forbes.com

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Deaths also at an all-time low, new government report shows (HealthDay News) -- Life expectancy in the United States has reached almost 78 years, a record high, federal health officials said Wednesday. Not only has life expectancy increased, but the death rate has dropped to an all-time low of 760.3 deaths per 100,000 people, according to the new report from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Read More