More Evidence That Middle-Aged People Are Getting Less Healthy

In a reversal of decades of improving health among older Americans, a new survey says that people age 51 - 56 have more difficulty in daily tasks and more pain than people the same age reported twelve years ago.

The study compares people born 1936-41, 1942-47, and 1948-53. Each group was asked the same questions when they were ages 51-56. The answers aren't what you'd expect:

Boomers indicate they have relatively more difficulty with a range of everyday physical tasks ... they also report having more pain, more chronic conditions, more drinking and psychiatric problems, than their HRS earlier counterparts. This trend portends poorly for the future health of Boomers as they age and incur increasing costs associated with health care and medications.

Since health was self-reported, one possibility is that the younger groups could have higher expectations for what their health should be, and dramatize any shortfall. It could also be that they simply perceive the same health problems as more significant than the older groups did.

Another, more serious possibility is that the self-reported data reflects real declining health, and Boomers are worse off than people born just before them. In a press release announcing the survey results, the National Institute on Aging, the component of the National Institutes of Health which sponsored the study, implicates the obesity epidemic.

Related to this is a possibility not mentioned by the NIA or the survey abstract: that the older groups may have received an unintended lifelong health benefit from food rationing during their World War 2 childhood. During the war, many families supplemented store-bought food with homegrown fruits and vegetables. Could that have provided them with a permanent head start on health?

Whatever the cause, the report is an indicator that decades of improvement in the health of older people could be coming to an end.