There are no diseases peculiar to old age and very few from which it is exempt.
-Alfred Worcester (1855-1951)

Between 1960 and 1990, while the overall U.S. population grew 39%, the ranks of those 85 and older jumped 232% (the over 65 group increasing 89% while the number of those under 25 grew by only 13%). A child born today who lives to age 65 is ten times more likely to reach 100 than people born one century ago (click here to see life expectancies at age 65 from 1910 on).  Now in the year 2000, there are an estimated  100,000 people aged 100+, up from 32,000 in 1990.  This should keep Willard Scott busy!

THE QUEST FOR LONGEVITY (IF NOT IMMORTALITY)

The quest for immortality seems to be an obsession of the human primate--its methodologies dating back to some of the earliest recorded messages of the past. The search for long (if not everlasting) life is implicit within Western mythology and within its scientific quests, as in:

• the antediluvian beliefs that people lived longer in some past Golden Age. Recall the supercentenarians in Genesis: Methuselah supposedly lived to a ripe 969 (5:27), Jared 962 (5:20), Noah 950 (9:29), and Adam 930 (5:5).
• the hyperborean beliefs that there are remote pockets of super longevity around the world, pristine places without the stresses and pollution of modern urban societies, where the old retain valued social roles. In the 1970s, for instance, the press carried stories of people living to extraordinary ages in Vilcabamba, high in the Andes of Ecuador, and in the Azerbaijan republic of the former USSR. In 1973, for instance, Soviet authorities reported the death of Azerbaijanian Shirali Mislimov, who supposedly lived to 168, who was from a republic where there were 63 centenarians per 100,000 population (compared to 3 in the United States).
• the fountain of youth myths, where some wondrous substance or procedure would extend life, such as young Achilles being dipped in the pool of immortality by his mother. Such long-lived personalities as Pope Pius XII, Bernard Baruch, and Somerset Maugham had the cells of unborn lambs injected into their veins.

Enthusiasms were tempered with Leonard Hayflick's discovery of the finite divisions of human cells, the so-called Hayflick Limit--that, at least at the cellular level, we are somehow programmed to die.  After all, if Darwin's mechanisms of natural selection are to work, old generations must be superceded by the new.  But there flickered hope in the cancer cells of Henrietta Lacks which, one-half century after whose host's death, live eternally on throughout the world.  Could the death gene(s) be turned off? Enter telomerase and its ability to lengthen the biological clock.  Listen to NPR's "Talk of the Nation's" "Merchants of Immortality" (aired June 4, 2003) featuring an interview with Stephen Hall, author of Merchants of Immortality: Chasing the Dream of Human Life Extension.

The Buck Institute:"Advancing Age Research"

International Longevity Center--USA "An Institute for Research and Policy on Aging"

Pamela McCorduck's "The Long and Winding Road: What happens when Gens X and Y ponder a 100-year lifespan? (American Demographics May 2000)

• how rates of alcoholism, heart disease and mental disorders increase with economic downturns.
• how cancer rates increase with level of industrialization.
• how depression is related to physical ailments. Eleanor Simonsick (Psychosomatic Medicine, 1995) found that depression among men and women 65 and older nearly triples their risk of stroke.
• how poverty impacts health. Samuel Broder, director of the National Cancer Institute in 1991, observed how people living below the federal poverty level have a death rate from cancer twice that of the rest of the population. Black men, who outnumber whites in poverty 3-to-1, were found to have a 25 percent higher cancer risk.
• how solitude can be lethal. According to a study by Nan Case et al. (Journal of the American Medical Association, January 22, 1992), heart attack victims who live alone are nearly twice as likely to die within six months as those living with someone else. One hypothesis holds that human contact produces protective hormones.
• recent stories of 60-something women giving birth bring to mind James Tanner's studies of the historical changes in female sexual maturation. Apparently over the past century and a half the age at menarche has declined by three-quarters of a month per decade. Data indicates, for instance, that the average Norwegian girl began menstruating at 17 in the 1840s, compared to 12.9 years by the mid-1980s. And then there were the mid-1980s stories of accelerated sexual growth from Puerto Rico, of girls ovulating as young as 9 months and young boys still in diapers sprouting hair under their arms.
• how cohorts differ in their rates of Alzheimers, brain and lung cancers, and deafness. Here consider the concept of cohort scars, those distinctive biological maladies experienced by particular cohorts in old age owing to the intersection of their biographies with social history. For instance, in VA hospitals we still see the long term effects of mustard gas exposures of World War I veterans. In 1983, physicians and statisticians estimated that, owing to medical advances, the number of infants born with some physical or mental disorder had doubled in the previous quarter century. What will be the quality of the lives of these individuals in old age?

Part of having a social purpose is having social responsibilities, and this has profound biological implications. Consider the findings below of Albert Bhak ("Social Integration Patterns and Senile Mortality," presented at the 1975 annual meetings of the American Sociological Association, San Francisco), who studied the monthly mortality rates for elderly men and women in three small South Korean villages. The data show the patterns of deaths of older persons, activity demands, climate, and food supply over one calendar year.

 

	DEATHS				ACTIVITY DEMANDS
MONTH	MALE	FEMALE	TOTAL		MALE	FEMALE	FOOD SUPPLY	CLIMATE
JAN	27	19	46		heavy	heavy	plentiful	harshest
FEB	32	26	58		nil	moderate	adequate	harsh
MAR	24	40	64		nil	nil	mild	low
APR	29	46	75		slight	nil	lowest	great!
MAY	29	32	61		moderate	slight	lowest	mild
JUN	16	14	30		heavy	prime	dwindling	unpleasant
JUL	21	18	39		prime	prime	adequate	harsh
AUG	33	19	52		slight	slight	low	harshest
SEP	18	14	32		heavy	heavy	dwindling	mild
OCT	20	16	36		prime	heavy	adequate	great!
NOV	31	27	58		slight	slight	plentiful	unpleasant
DEC	48	20	68		nil	heavy	plentiful	harsh

Do you observe any patterns? Bhak performed some statistical analyses and came up with the following correlations of older Korean mortality rates:

CORRELATES OF OLDER MALE AND FEMALE DEATHS

 

# DEATHS x	MALES	FEMALES
ACTIVITY DEMANDS	-.73	-.86
CLIMATE	.39	.05
FOOD SUPPLY	-.15	.20

What does this tell you? First, activity demands produce the strongest correlation with the number of older persons' deaths--specifically, the greater the monthly social responsibilities of older persons the lower their death rate (and, conversely, the fewer the role demands the higher the death rate of older persons). The harsher the climate the more likely old men (not women--guess who must be indoors) die. And although small, the sex difference in signs of the food supply-death correlations is interesting. Guess who gets fed first.

Click here to see

• Self-reported health status by age, sex and race
• Happiness across the lifespan by health status
• State death rates of those 65+ due to Alzheimer's;
• Mortality trends for Alzheimer's Disease by age, 1979-91. Click here to see study from the National Center for Health Statistics (pdf format) and PBS's The Forgetting: A Portrait of Alzheimer's

In Andrew Scharlach and Barry Robinson's "Curricular Module on the Aging Process" (Berkeley), see their sections on the physiology of aging and sensory changes

Ever wish to compare the world records of different age groups for the same athletic event? The place to find such information is the World Masters Athletics website

Elizabeth L. Rogers's "Why do we age?"

NATIONAL INSTITUTE ON AGING

The Merck Manual of Geriatrics Comprehensive overview of the medical, social, psychological, and ethical issues in eldercare

Novartis Foundation for Gerontological Research

National Ageing Research Institute (Australia)

The Aging Research Centre Includes listings of scientists, laboratories and companies involved in aging research

from USC's Ageworks, Changes with Aging

GeroNet: Health and Aging Resources for Higher Education (UCLA)

Gerard F. Anderson & Peter S. Hussey, "Health and Population Aging: A Multinational Comparison"

Alliance for Aging Research--"the nation's leading non-profit organization dedicated to improving the health and independence of Americans as they age through public and private funding of medical research and geriatric education"

Susan Voge's "Ask NOAH About: Aging and Alzheimer's". For a first-hand journal detailing experiences with the disease, see Mary's Place.

Diseases involved in aging

Alzheimer's Association--from the national voluntary health organization in Chicago.  A rich resource is its Diversity Toolbox.

Alzheimer Web Home Page

The Life Extension Foundation

The Longevity Game!

Health and Retirement Study

Return to Social Gerontology Index