To risk stating the obvious, none of us is getting any younger. Nor are we staying the same age from year to year, or even from minute to minute. We are aging. Aging is a gradual developmental process of biological, psychological, sociological, and behavioral change that begins, in a sense, the moment we are born.
In another sense the one we`ll use here aging can be said to start at the time that we reach maturity. It is the change that occurs between the time we attain maturity and the end of our life.
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| Aging |
If we could break down these data year by year, we would see the gradual rise in the percentages. But note that according to these figures, more than half of all people aged sixty-five and over are still able to go about their daily activities with no limitation whatever! Thus, it is difficult to pick a chronological age to serve as a reference point for denoting “old age”. The most commonly used age is sixty-five years; but this point, originally established when the social security system was instituted, is rather arbitrary.
Gerontologists use several categories: “young-old”, generally between the ages of sixty-five and seventy-four; “middle-old”, between seventy-five and eighty-four; and “old-old”, eighty-five years and beyond. Alternatively, moving away from the strictly chronological approach, “young-old” can be used to refer to aged persons whose lives are active, creative, vigorous, and productive; at the other extreme are the “old-old” or “frail elderly”, who are unable to care for themselves. Clearly, the number of years a person has lived is not the best index of human developmental processes; environmental factors can enhance or erode a person`s functional capacity, and the physical, mental, and social components of aging are closely interrelated.
References :
Metropolitan Life Foundation, Statistical Bulletin 63, No. 1, January-March, 1982.
Marvin R Levy, Mark Dignan, Janet H Shirreffs, Essentials of Life & Health, Fourth Edition, Random House, New York, 1984.
