Baby boomers – people born in the late 1940s and 1950s – are living longer than the generation before them, but also experiencing more health problems as they get older, a new study reveals.
Self-reported health and measures of body-mass indexes across England, Europe, and the US indicate obesity, disability, and chronic disease are on the rise.
That's based on database records of 114,526 people collected between 2004 and 2018, and analyzed by researchers from University College London (UCL) and the University of Oxford in the UK.
The findings suggest that long-term improvements in life expectancy globally might not be matched by better health in old age.
"Our study finds concerning new evidence that more recently born generations are experiencing worsening health as they enter their later years," says health scientist Laura Gimeno, from UCL.
"We find that there is a 'generational health drift', whereby younger generations tend to have worse health than previous generations at the same age."
With some conditions – including cancer, lung disease, diabetes, and high cholesterol – baby boomers were more than one-and-a-half times more likely to be affected as they went into their 50s and 60s.
The researchers also found that improvements in disability rates had stalled or even gone into reverse in some places, though this varied by region. It's the same for mobility – being able to wash, eat, and walk short distances.
These are surprising findings, considering the advances we've seen in medical treatments and health awareness over the decades. It chimes with other studies that have found elderly people having more health issues than previous generations – and not just because they're living longer, or conditions are being spotted earlier.
The study doesn't look closely at the underlying reasons for this happening, but does note trends like increasing numbers of people being overweight, and declines in physical activity in some regions, as possible factors that are involved.
"Despite declining rates of disability for the pre-war generations, chronic disease and increasing obesity may be spilling over into severe disability for the baby boomers," says Gimeno.
With fertility and birth rates declining, and life expectancy rising, the elderly proportion of the population is expanding – and that means more demands in terms of making sure people are well looked after in their later years.
However, the researchers stress that this isn't a trend that we have to accept: improvements in diagnosis and treatments mean that we're more clued up than ever about preventing, spotting, and managing health issues. The more we know about what's happening, the more we can do about it.
"Exploring when in the life-course generational differences in physical and mental health emerge can further contribute to better understanding mechanisms underpinning the generational health drift," write the authors, "and, crucially, inform strategies to reverse it,"
The research has been published in the Journals of Gerontology.