- TUESDAY, Aug. 19 (HealthDay News) — Living longer, even past the
100-year mark, doesn't necessarily mean that a person's last years will be
spent in sickness or disability, Danish researchers report. That's
because the very old typically enjoy healthy, independent lives despite
their advanced age, the study found.

“This finding is not surprising,” said Dr. James S. Goodwin, a
professor of geriatrics and director of the Sealy Center on Aging at the
University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston. “Because when you think
about it logically, the reason we're living longer is because we're
healthier. And if we're healthier at any given age, then we're less likely
to be disabled.”

The new finding is based on assessments of the physical and mental
health of Danish citizens in their 90s. These elderly were tested
periodically on their ability to take care of themselves as they
approached their 100th year.

Goodwin — who was not involved in the study — believes it also
refutes the prevalent notion that an aging population will bring about
skyrocketing health care expenditures. Such theories hold that, “all the
nursing homes will choke, as more and more people spend much more time
disabled,” Goodwin said. “But in reality, that hasn't really worked out to
be the case.”

The new study was led by Dr. Kaare Christensen of The Danish Aging
Research Center at the University of Southern Denmark in Odense. The team
reported its findings in the Aug. 18-22 issue of the Proceedings of the
National Academy of Sciences.

To gauge recent quality of life trends among the so-called
“super-elderly”, Christensen's team launched mental and physical health
surveys in 1998 that focused on an initial group of almost 2,300 Danish
men and women, all of whom had been born in 1905.

The researchers did not exclude anyone on the basis of prior health
issues or cognitive status at the start of the study. In all, four surveys
were conducted — one approximately every two years– and all tracked the
same group of individuals as they aged from 92 to 100.

By the time of the last survey in 2005, just 166 of the participants
were still alive. However, the study authors observed that among those
super-elderly still alive at the time of each survey, the percentage that
was still able to maintain a functionally independent lifestyle remained
nearly constant.

Across surveys, those deemed to be mentally and physically
“independent” — able to perform basic tasks on their own, while remaining
free of serious and disabling cognitive, sensory, or physical
impairment — declined only “very modestly” from 39 percent at age 92 to
33 percent by age 100, the researchers reported.

According to the researchers, those patients who made it to 100 were,
by definition, healthy enough to do so, whereas those who weren't as
healthy passed away at an earlier age. This finding, they said, meant
that any boom in the numbers of super-elderly would not necessarily
translate into a steep rise in health care expeditures.

“This is very good news that I can give to some very old people,” noted
Goodwin. “I can tell my elderly patients that their chances of being able
to take care of themselves 10 years from now is the same as it is
now.”

For his part, Dr. Thomas Perls, an associate professor of medicine and
geriatrics at Boston Medical Center, shared Goodwin's optimistic reading
of the findings, while describing the independence-with-age dynamic as a
geriatric “survival of the fittest.”

“As I like to say, the older you get, the healthier you've been,” he
said. “So getting to 100 really is a survival phenomenon. And people who
get there necessarily have to have been disability-free — not only in
their early 90's, but pretty much for the vast majority of their
lives.”

More information

For more on healthy aging, visit the National Institute on Aging.