RE-AGING: Reassessing Aging from a Population Perspective

Part-supported through the EU-funded RE-AGEING project, researchers offer population forecasting studies that encourage societies to break from outdated aging measures and instead start categorizing based on how we live our lives. Not that long ago, when the hippie years were in full tempo around the world in the 1960s, being 60 years old would have been considered “old.” The average life expectancy in the world back then was <55 years old. Now, being 60 years old is not considered so ancient because of improvements in life expectancy (nearing 70 years old globally), health, and life-style. Nevertheless, this living reality shift struggles to be reflected by policy makers in their aging calculations and corresponding classifications that nonetheless strongly characterize age-related social stigma. Taking the changing characteristics of groups of people, such as life expectancy and cognitive functioning into account allows the construction of new, multidimensional measures of aging. These new measures provide novel perspectives on important policy questions,” shares Sanderson.