Expert on aging says people may begin dying younger

Industrialized countries realizing the prophecy that members of the current younger generation could be worse off economically than their parents can also expect another bit of bad news: People are going to start dying younger, too.

"We like to think people just keep getting older, but indications are the opposite is far more likely," Sara Arber, one of the world's leading authorities on aging, in town recently to keynote the annual Siciliano Forum at the University of Utah, told the Deseret News.

The global ripple effect of economic collapse among developed nations is a type of precursor to the wave of social and financial problems of a rapidly burgeoning elderly population in developed and underdeveloped countries, Arber said.

The Centre for Research on Ageing and Gender at the University of Surrey in the United Kingdom, where Arber is co-director, has produced several landmark studies, including one about five years ago on the plight of divorced older men. It showed, counter to accepted attitudes, that they start behaving like old dogs — they seek isolation over company, become wary of friends and neighbors, avoid doctors and generally begin to consider other people as a kind of hell on earth.

Americans have their eye on the graying baby boomer generations, but they have yet to face that manifolding need in the wake of decreasing economic certainties and the decline of younger workers who simply won't be able to shoulder the needs of the aged.

As economic paradigms shift, the increasing stresses of midlife are carried into older life, she said.

Those stresses cause their own particular types of physically and emotionally withering effects, Arber said, and dealing with them can cause behaviors that multiply worries, such as resorting to overeating, inactivity, alcohol and popping pills that are acts of self-medicating but turn out to be self-defeating.

In turn, their vitality dissipates, and immune systems aren't as quick to recover. "This is where not getting enough sleep due to stresses plays an enormous role," she said, and actually begins a faster erosion toward chronic illness and death.

Issues aren't just end-of-life health-care questions but the lack of infrastructure in an age with ever-decreasing links to extended family members as long-term care providers, she said. The widespread lack of even wanting to talk about advanced directives or end-of-life care overwhelmed reform debates this past summer with allegations the U.S. government was attempting establish "death panels."