Según la investigación, los adultos mayores que acaban de dar a luz tienen más probabilidades de reportar condiciones crónicas en general y que estos problemas comiencen temprano en la vida.
En comparación con las generaciones anteriores, las personas mayores tienen más probabilidades de sufrir una variedad de trastornos de salud.
Según una investigación de la Universidad Estatal de Pensilvania y la Universidad Estatal de Texas, las generaciones posteriores de adultos mayores en los Estados Unidos tienen más probabilidades de desarrollar trastornos de salud crónicos que las generaciones anteriores.
Los investigadores afirman que las enfermedades múltiples, el término para múltiples trastornos de salud crónicos, representan una seria amenaza para el bienestar de la población que envejece. Como resultado, puede haber una carga mayor para los sistemas de seguro médico y federal, así como para la salud de los adultos mayores, particularmente porque para el 2050, más del 50 % de los estadounidenses mayores de 65 años vivirán en los Estados Unidos. estados
Los resultados, según Stephen Haas, profesor asociado de sociología y demografía en Penn State, son consistentes con otros estudios recientes que indican que la salud de las generaciones recientes en los Estados Unidos es generalmente peor que la de sus predecesores.
«Incluso antes[{» attribute=»»>COVID-19 pandemic, we were beginning to see declines in life expectancy among middle-aged Americans, a reversal of more than a century-long trend,” Haas said. “Furthermore, the past 30 years has seen population health in the U.S. fall behind that in other high-income countries, and our findings suggest that the U.S. is likely to continue to fall further behind our peers.”
The researchers said the findings could help inform policy to address the potentially diminishing health in our expanding population of older adults. The paper was recently published in The Journals of Gerontology and was also worked on by Ana Quiñones, Oregon Health & Science University.
The Health and Retirement Study, a nationally representative survey of aging Americans, provided the researchers with data on adults aged 51 and older for the study. The research evaluated nine chronic conditions—heart disease, hypertension, stroke, diabetes, arthritis, lung disease, cancer (other than skin cancer), high depressive symptoms, and cognitive impairment—to determine the multimorbidity rate. The researchers also looked at the circumstances that cause generational differences in multimorbidity.
They discovered that older people who were born more recently had a higher likelihood of reporting more chronic diseases and having those problems start earlier in life.
“For example, when comparing those born between 1948-65 – referred to as Baby Boomers — to those born during the later years of the Great Depression (between 1931 and 1941) at similar ages,” Haas said, “Baby Boomers exhibited a greater number of chronic health conditions. Baby Boomers also reported two or more chronic health conditions at younger ages.”
The researchers also found that sociodemographic factors such as race and ethnicity, whether the person was born in the U.S., childhood socioeconomic circumstances, and childhood health affected the risk of multimorbidity for all generations. Among adults with multimorbidity, arthritis and hypertension were the most prevalent conditions for all generations, and there was evidence that high depressive symptoms and diabetes contributed to the observed generational differences in multimorbidity risk.
Nicholas Bishop, assistant professor at Texas State University, said there could be multiple explanations for the findings.
“Later-born generations have had access to more advanced modern medicine for a greater period of their lives, therefore we may expect them to enjoy better health than those born to prior generations,” Bishop said. “Though this is partially true, advanced medical treatments may enable individuals to live with multiple chronic conditions that once would have proven fatal, potentially increasing the likelihood that any one person experiences multimorbidity.”
He added that older adults in more recently born generations have also had greater exposure to health risk factors such as obesity, which increases the likelihood of experiencing chronic disease. Medical advances have also been accompanied by better surveillance and measurement of disease, leading to the identification of chronic conditions which once may have gone undiagnosed.
The researchers said future studies could try to find explanations for these differences in multimorbidity between generations.
The National Institute on Aging at the National Institutes of Health helped support this research.
Reference: “Cohort Trends in the Burden of Multiple Chronic Conditions Among Aging U.S. Adults” by Nicholas J Bishop, PhD, Steven A Haas, PhD and Ana R Quiñones, PhD, 1 June 2022, The Journals of Gerontology.
DOI: 10.1093/geronb/gbac070
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