Scientists push back old age

2024 Author: James Gerald | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 14:00

Modern society is rapidly getting younger. Retirement is not considered the last frontier, but equates to a new stage in life. And when does old age begin? According to scientists, the time has come to revise the age scale; it is now worth starting the countdown of old age from 74 years.

Today, in developed countries, when speaking of old age, people mean over 65 years of age. However, scientists from the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) disagree with this and argue that old age should be determined not by absolute age, but by how much (on average in the country) a person is left to live.

According to scientists, old age begins when a person has 15 years to live or less. For the baby boomer generation (born in the US and Europe in the 1945-1960s), this means they are considered middle-aged up to 74 years old.

“Ideas about old age change over time. Two hundred years ago, sixty-year-olds were considered very old. Now they are just mature people, it seems to me,”said the head of the study, demographer Sergei Shcherbov.

The scientist believes that, most likely, in the near future, the age bracket will have to be revised again, because older people will more and more resemble modern young people.

According to other gerontologists and sociologists, old age certainly begins later than a hundred or even fifty years ago. “Today's seventy-year-olds feel like they are fifty. But you should not assign a specific age of onset of old age. The gap in life expectancy between rich and poor is nine years, and a healthy life - as much as 19, said Alan Walker, a Sheffield University scientist earlier.