D’après les recherches, les personnes âgées nées plus récemment sont plus susceptibles de déclarer souffrir de plus de maladies chroniques en général et de voir ces problèmes commencer plus tôt dans la vie.
Par rapport aux générations précédentes, les personnes âgées sont plus susceptibles de souffrir de divers problèmes de santé.
Selon des recherches menées par les universités de Penn State et de Texas State, les générations de personnes âgées nées plus tard aux États-Unis sont plus susceptibles de souffrir de troubles de santé chroniques que les générations qui les ont précédées.
Les chercheurs affirment que la multimorbidité, terme désignant la présence de plusieurs troubles de santé chroniques, représente un grave danger pour le bien-être des populations vieillissantes. Il pourrait en résulter une charge plus importante pour les systèmes de soins de santé et d’assurance fédérale ainsi que pour la santé des personnes âgées, d’autant plus que d’ici 2050, il y aura plus de 50 % d’Américains de plus de 65 ans vivant aux États-Unis.
Les résultats, selon Steven Haas, professeur associé de sociologie et de démographie à Penn State, sont cohérents avec d’autres études récentes qui indiquent que la santé des générations les plus récentes aux États-Unis est généralement moins bonne que celle de leurs prédécesseurs.
“Même avant le COVID-19 pandemic, we were beginning to see declines in life expectancy among middle-aged Americans, a reversal of more than a century-long trend,” Haas said. “Furthermore, the past 30 years has seen population health in the U.S. fall behind that in other high-income countries, and our findings suggest that the U.S. is likely to continue to fall further behind our peers.”
The researchers said the findings could help inform policy to address the potentially diminishing health in our expanding population of older adults. The paper was recently published in The Journals of Gerontology and was also worked on by Ana Quiñones, Oregon Health & Science University.
The Health and Retirement Study, a nationally representative survey of aging Americans, provided the researchers with data on adults aged 51 and older for the study. The research evaluated nine chronic conditions—heart disease, hypertension, stroke, diabetes, arthritis, lung disease, cancer (other than skin cancer), high depressive symptoms, and cognitive impairment—to determine the multimorbidity rate. The researchers also looked at the circumstances that cause generational differences in multimorbidity.
They discovered that older people who were born more recently had a higher likelihood of reporting more chronic diseases and having those problems start earlier in life.
“For example, when comparing those born between 1948-65 – referred to as Baby Boomers — to those born during the later years of the Great Depression (between 1931 and 1941) at similar ages,” Haas said, “Baby Boomers exhibited a greater number of chronic health conditions. Baby Boomers also reported two or more chronic health conditions at younger ages.”
The researchers also found that sociodemographic factors such as race and ethnicity, whether the person was born in the U.S., childhood socioeconomic circumstances, and childhood health affected the risk of multimorbidity for all generations. Among adults with multimorbidity, arthritis and hypertension were the most prevalent conditions for all generations, and there was evidence that high depressive symptoms and diabetes contributed to the observed generational differences in multimorbidity risk.
Nicholas Bishop, assistant professor at Texas State University, said there could be multiple explanations for the findings.
“Later-born generations have had access to more advanced modern medicine for a greater period of their lives, therefore we may expect them to enjoy better health than those born to prior generations,” Bishop said. “Though this is partially true, advanced medical treatments may enable individuals to live with multiple chronic conditions that once would have proven fatal, potentially increasing the likelihood that any one person experiences multimorbidity.”
He added that older adults in more recently born generations have also had greater exposure to health risk factors such as obesity, which increases the likelihood of experiencing chronic disease. Medical advances have also been accompanied by better surveillance and measurement of disease, leading to the identification of chronic conditions which once may have gone undiagnosed.
The researchers said future studies could try to find explanations for these differences in multimorbidity between generations.
The National Institute on Aging at the National Institutes of Health helped support this research.
Reference: “Cohort Trends in the Burden of Multiple Chronic Conditions Among Aging U.S. Adults” by Nicholas J Bishop, PhD, Steven A Haas, PhD and Ana R Quiñones, PhD, 1 June 2022, The Journals of Gerontology.
DOI: 10.1093/geronb/gbac070
