Older Adults - The Longevity Revolution, The Aging Of America, Leading Causes Of Death Among The Elderly, Dementia
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As of the early twenty-first century, the United States was on the threshold of a "longevity revolution." Dr. Robert N. Butler, the first director of the National Institute of Aging and chairman of the International Longevity Center, observed that during the twentieth century, life expectancy rose further and faster than during the entire period from ancient Rome (275 BCE, when life …
According to the U.S. Census Bureau, 12.4% of the population (approximately thirty-five million people) were sixty-five years of age or older in 2000. From just 4% of the total population in 1900, those age sixty-five and older are projected to account for 20.7% of the population, or 86.8 million people, in the year 2050. (See Table 10.2.) The first children born during the post-World War II �…
More than six out of every ten people age sixty-five and over who died in 2002 were the victims of diseases of the heart, cancer (malignant neoplasms), or stroke (cerebrovascular diseases). (See Table 10.3.) Coronary heart disease (CHD) is the leading cause of death in the United States and remains the leading cause of death among older Americans. Approximately four out of five people who died of …
Older people with mental problems were once labeled "senile." However, researchers have found that physical disorders can cause progressive deterioration of mental and neurological functions. These disorders produce symptoms that are collectively known as dementia. Symptoms of dementia include loss of language functions, inability to think abstractly, inability to care for TABLE 10.2…
According to the American Association of Geriatric Psychiatry, more than six million of the more than forty million Americans over the age of sixty-five suffer from depression. Family members and health care professionals often fail to recognize depression among the elderly. Because older people usually suffer from comorbidity (the presence of more than one chronic illness at one time), depression…
In the United States the life expectancy in 2002 for females born in that year was 5.4 years more than for males born the same year—79.9 years and 74.5 years, respectively. (See Table 10.1.) In 2000 there were eighty-five men ages sixty-five to sixty-nine for every one hundred women in the same age span. As both sexes age, the gap widens. For those age eighty and over, there were only fifty…
Geriatrics is the medical subspecialty concerned with the prevention and treatment of diseases in the elderly. In 1909 Dr. Ignatz L. Nascher coined the term geriatrics from the Greek "geras" (old age) and "iatrikos" (physician). Geriatricians are physicians trained in internal medicine or family practice who obtain additional training and certification in the diagnosis …
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