Stats show you don't have to fall apart with aging

Study Finds-   Most Americans expect their minds and bodies to slowly fall apart with age. So do most of their doctors. A Yale University study says that expectation is not just wrong for many older adults. It turns out it may be part of what makes it come true.

Researchers found that nearly half of adults 65 and older showed measurable improvement in brain function, physical mobility, or both between their first and final assessments over up to 12 years of follow-up. People who held more positive beliefs about aging were significantly more likely to be in that improving group. That held true even for people who were already healthy and functioning well at the start. A sunnier outlook on getting older turned out to predict genuinely better health down the road.

The study, published in Geriatrics, cuts against what most people, and most health professionals, believe. A global survey cited in the paper found 65% of healthcare providers and 80% of laypeople falsely believed all older adults develop dementia. A separate U.S. survey found 77% of Americans aged 40 and older expect their own cognition to slip. Given all that, the Yale findings land as something of a wake-up call: and raise a pointed question about whether expectations around aging might influence the very outcomes people experience later in life.

Lead author Becca R. Levy, a professor at the Yale School of Public Health and Psychology Department, has spent her career making the case that cultural attitudes about aging are not abstract; they have real, measurable effects on health. Her framework, Stereotype Embodiment Theory, holds that people absorb beliefs about aging early in life, through media, family, and the attitudes of institutions around them. When those beliefs are mostly negative, they tend to become self-reinforcing once a person actually gets old. When they are positive, the body appears to respond in kind.