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Many Adults 65 and Older Improve With Age, Study Finds
Yale researchers tracked cognition and walking speed for up to 12 years, challenging assumptions about later-life decline
A Yale study found that many adults 65 and older improved in cognitive function, physical function or both over time, challenging the idea that aging follows only one path.
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Key takeaways
- A team of researchers at Yale University analyzed data from more than 11,000 adults age 65 and older and found that 45 percent improved in cognitive function, physical function or both over as long as 12 years.
- Participants with more positive beliefs about aging were more likely to improve in both areas.
- Experts say the findings disprove a common misconception that decline is inevitable with age.
Many people assume getting older means slowing down — mentally, physically or both. But a recent study out of Yale University offers a more hopeful view of aging. Researchers followed more than 11,000 adults age 65 and older for up to 12 years and found that nearly half of them improved in physical or cognitive function.
If those results were extrapolated to the entire U.S. population, “it would suggest that more than 26 million older persons are experiencing an improvement in functioning,” the researchers wrote in the study, published in the journal Geriatrics. The findings surprised study coauthor Becca Levy, a professor of social and behavioral sciences at the Yale School of Public Health.
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Levy expected to find some older adults improving over time. What surprised her was how many did.
“I think the number of people that showed improvement surprised me,” Levy told AARP. “I wasn’t expecting it to be as high as it turned out to be.”
Researchers measured cognitive function with a global cognitive performance assessment. They measured physical function by walking speed. Participants were considered to have improved if their scores increased over the 12-year study period.
“Many people equate aging with an inevitable and continuous loss of physical and cognitive abilities,” Levy said in a news release. “What we found is that improvement in later life is not rare, it’s common, and it should be included in our understanding of the aging process.”
The data came from the Health and Retirement Study, a long-running University of Michigan survey that follows a representative sample of about 20,000 people in the United States.
The findings do not mean everyone gets sharper or stronger with age. Many people do experience cognitive or physical decline. But the study found that improvement is possible for a meaningful share of older adults, and that later-life health does not follow a single path.
The researchers also looked at whether people’s beliefs about aging helped predict who improved. Participants with a more positive outlook on aging at the start of the study were significantly more likely to improve in both cognition and walking speed, even after researchers accounted for age, sex, education, chronic disease, depression and length of follow-up.
Levy said people absorb ideas about getting older from the culture around them, including media, marketing and advertising that frame aging as a time of “universal and inevitable decline.”
“If people are able to take in more positive age beliefs or resist some of the negative messages about getting older from our culture, or are able to shift their age beliefs,” Levy said, “the positive age beliefs can act as a resource.”
The idea for the study began, in part, with notable examples of people who got better later in life. Levy thought about long-distance swimmer Diana Nyad, 76, who completed a Cuba-to-Florida swim at age 64 after several unsuccessful earlier attempts, and painter J.M.W. Turner, who continued to create major work late in life. She wanted to know whether those stories were rare exceptions or part of a larger pattern.
Levy said the findings can also apply to people who are dealing with a health challenge, especially those considering changes to everyday habits that could support resilience or recovery.
One place to start, Levy said, is with the images of aging that people keep in mind. In her book, Breaking the Age Code, she suggests building a “portfolio” of positive examples: older people admired for their work ethic, humor, generosity or other traits. They might be relatives, neighbors, public figures or characters from books and movies.
“I think the number one message is that there are a lot of different trajectories of health in later life and one of them is improvement,” Levy said. “So I think it’s good to be aware of that potential, that possibility.”
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