`Old’ redefined: Now it’s a healthy outgrowth of middle age.
Just as 80 million Baby Boomers have begun to turn 50, these are the emerging images of “old” age: John Glenn, 77, soon to return to orbit in a space shuttle; George Bush, 72, floating in a parachute last year; Gloria Stuart, 87, an Oscar contender for her role in “Titanic.”
Joined by millions of others, these older Americans are at the vanguard of what geriatric experts now refer to as “The Third Age”–the extension of healthy middle age well into what we once thought were the sunset years.
Among the factors propelling this redefinition of the human life span are markedly better health habits and an array of medical advances–from the conquering of once-fatal diseases to the remarkable discovery of a way to reverse cellular aging. The result, many experts believe, is that healthy babies born today likely will live a full century, and their children may live to see 120 or beyond.
“So striking are these trends that social scientists are talking about the entire life span in new terms,” says Lydia Bronte, director of the Aging Society Project for the Carnegie Corp. and author of “The Longevity Factor.”
“Rather than perceiving adulthood as divided between career and retirement, social scientists speak of a vital `third age’ (that) holds the potential for launching new careers, working part time, or volunteering,” Bronte says.
“Extraordinarily large numbers of people will have 20, 30 or even 40 years more of active life than they expected, and it will be time that is part of a normal adulthood rather than of old age.”
Typical of the new images of aging are two classmates in a rigorous, two-hour yoga class at Florida International University’s Elders Institute: Judy Silverman, 69, who joined because her three days a week at the gym aren’t enough for her, and Carol Milett, a widow in her 50s whose exercise “role model” is her 81-year-old mother, an avid swimmer at Century Village in Pembroke Pines, Fla.
“Besides working out, I walk, I watch what I eat, and I drink a lot of water,” Silverman says. “I started 15 years ago, and my goal is to stay fit and to stay up.”
They help explain why 95.8 percent of Americans age 65 to 74 live independently. At the start of Social Security in 1935, only 4 percent survived past 65. There also has been a 15 percent decline in disabilities among people older than 80 in the past 15 years.
Breakthroughs in genetic research have caused geriatrics experts to ponder a Methuselah future. The latest was revealed two weeks ago, at about the same time Glenn announced his pending return to space: the discovery at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center of a gene-activated enzyme that rejuvenates cells by causing them to replicate long after their viability normally fades.
It carries incredible implications, including the possibility of drugs within 10 years that will induce diseased hearts, lungs and other organs to replicate healthy new tissue.
And while far from certain, it means that, for the first time, science offers the hope of breaking the biological barrier that prevents the life span of the human species from exceeding what has been considered the maximum: 120 years.
“Our grandchildren will look back on our life expectancies the way we look back at the life expectancies of cavemen who died in their 20s,” says Dr. Carl Eisdorfer, director of the University of Miami Center for Adult Development and Aging.
Increases in longevity have occurred basically in two dramatic waves, the first primarily involving children and the second involving older people:
The first spanned the turn of the century to 1970 and was caused by public health improvements that included sewage systems, pollution cleanup, safer food processing and vaccinations against childhood diseases such as polio. In the United States, “we dropped (annual) infant mortality from the tens of thousands to thousands,” Eisdorfer says. “That added 25 years to life expectancy.”
The second wave–in the 1970s and ’80s–is attributed to better treatments for pneumonia, heart and liver disease, and better public awareness of the dangers of smoking and the importance of exercise and nutrition.
The advances were this dramatic: Between 1970 and ’79, the number of Americans still alive after age 75 increased by almost 40 percent. And the trend is accelerating.
Eisdorfer offers himself as an example: As a child, he nearly died of pneumonia and also had measles, mumps and chicken pox. His children have had none of those. That has a cumulative effect on their respective life expectancies.
“A baby born in the ’90s has a thirtyfold better chance to live to be 100 than in 1900,” he says.
