Seniors

Time - The summer of 2023 was the hottest on record since 1850, and this summer could be just as sweltering. That puts older adults—a group especially vulnerable to heat-related illnesses—at elevated risks for a number of health conditions and outcomes. Older people are less able to regulate changes in body and environmental temperatures, and higher temperatures put them at increased risk of dehydration, heat stroke, blood pressure changes, muscle cramps, and dizziness. These issues are likely to become far more prevalent than they currently are. From now until 2050, the number of people 60 years or older will double to nearly 2.1 billion, making up 21% of the global population, according to projections from the World Health Organization.

Giacomo Falchetta, a scientist at the Euro-Mediterranean Center on Climate Change in Italy, and his team wanted to better understand the scope of the problem. In a new study published in Nature Communications, they correlated a given population's age with the region's temperatures to project how older people will be affected by hotter weather.They found that by 2050, more than 23% of the world’s population over age 69 will be living where peak temperatures reach beyond 99.5°F (37.5°C), compared to just 14% of that group today. That means that up to 246 million more elderly people will be exposed to dangerously high temperatures.