Health and Aging

This chapter presents the relationship between health and Aging and examines the way in which research on health and aging has changed over the past several years.

Abstract

This chapter presents the relationship between health and aging and examines the way in which research on health and aging has changed over the past several years. As the research on health and aging shifted from examining older people to the aging process, studies using the long view of aging generated important insights regarding how health and social status in early life influence health in later life. The cumulative-disadvantage theory addresses life-course inequalities and gives explicit attention to how this involves a process of cohort differentiation. Certain cohorts are more advantaged than others from the start, but each cohort also becomes more heterogeneous because of social stratification and accumulated experiences. For health, one sees the substantial variation in functional ability and health behavior in later life and looks backward over cohort history and personal biography to the events, experiences, and inequalities that raise the risk of adverse health outcomes. People use medical-care services over the life course, but aging increases the frequency of interactions with health-care personnel. Self-care may continue to play a significant role in the management of chronic disease, but older adults in most modern societies rely heavily on the medical-care system for handling morbidity.