Baby boomers (people born in the late 1940s and 1950s) are living longer than previous generations, but they experience more health problems as they age, new research shows. It became clear.
Measures of self-reported health and body mass index across the UK, Europe and America show that obesity, disability and chronic disease are on the rise.
It is based on database records of 114,526 people collected between 2004 and 2018 and analyzed by researchers from University College London (UCL) and the University of Oxford in the UK.
The findings suggest that long-term improvements in global life expectancy may not be matched by improvements in health in old age.
“Our study finds worrying new evidence that the health of the recently born generation is worsening as they enter later life,” says UCL health scientist Laura Gimeno.
“We found that there is an ‘intergenerational health bias’ in which younger generations tend to have worse health outcomes than previous generations of the same age.”
Baby boomers with several diseases, including cancer, lung disease, diabetes and high cholesterol, were more than 1.5 times more likely to develop the disease as they reached their 50s and 60s.
The researchers also found that improvements in disability rates have stalled or even reversed in some regions, although they vary by region. The same goes for mobility, which allows you to wash, eat, and walk short distances.
These are surprising discoveries given the advances in medicine and health awareness we’ve seen over the decades. This is consistent with other studies that have found that older people have more health problems than previous generations, simply because older people live longer or catch diseases sooner. Not just because it happened.
The study did not explore in detail the underlying reasons why this is happening, but factors that may be involved include an increase in the number of overweight people and a lack of physical activity in some regions. A trend of decline has been pointed out.
“Despite declines in disability rates for prewar generations, increases in chronic disease and obesity may be spilling over into more severe disabilities for baby boomers,” Jimeno said.
As birth rates and fertility rates decline and life expectancy increases, the proportion of older people in the population is increasing. This means more demands are being made in terms of ensuring that people are well looked after in their later years.
However, researchers stress that this is not a trend we have to accept. Advances in diagnosis and treatment mean we know more about preventing, detecting and managing health problems than ever before. The more you know about what’s going on, the more you can do about it.
The authors conclude that “exploring when generational differences in physical and mental health emerge over the life course could further contribute to a better understanding of the mechanisms underpinning intergenerational health biases. “can be done, and, importantly, can inform strategies to reverse it.”
The study was published in the Journals of Gerontology.
