Don’t let anyone say your best days are behind you!
People aged 75 to 80 are now moving, talking, thinking, reasoning and remembering better than ever before, according to new research from the University of Jyväskylä, Finland.
The study measured physical and cognitive performance of a group of people aged 75 to 80, and compared these to measurements taken by people the same age in the 90s.
These performance-based measurements are designed to be a good indicator of how an individual is managing their day-to-day life, and can be used to determine their functional age.
And if the results are anything to go by, we’re younger than ever before.
Ageing ‘better’ than previous generations
Muscle strength, walking speed, reaction speed, verbal fluency, reasoning and working memory were better across the board in the cohort, when compared to their counterparts 30 years earlier.
Researchers believe a few factors are driving this.
“Higher physical activity and increased body size explained the better walking speed and muscle strength among the later-born cohort,” says doctoral student Kaisa Koivunen.
But the main difference between the cohorts when it came to cognitive performance was better education.
Better education and health care lengthening our ‘healthy’ years
This makes sense to us. The world is a very different place to what it was 30 years ago, with most of us having access to better nutrition, hygiene and education, improvements in health care and the school system, and an improved working life.
The principal investigator of the study, Professor Taina Rantanen, says these results seem to suggest our understanding of old age might be a bit old-fashioned.
“From an ageing researcher’s point of view, more years are added to midlife, and not so much to the utmost end of life. Increased life expectancy provides us with more non-disabled years, but at the same time, the last years of life comes at higher and higher ages, increasing the need for care,” she said.
It’s not like we needed any more evidence, but it just goes to show age is only a number!
