{"id":1169,"date":"2019-11-02T18:03:50","date_gmt":"2019-11-02T18:03:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/jobbinghood.com\/finance\/2019\/11\/02\/good-news-for-older-americans-70-is-the-new-60-but-not-for-everyone\/"},"modified":"2019-11-02T18:03:50","modified_gmt":"2019-11-02T18:03:50","slug":"good-news-for-older-americans-70-is-the-new-60-but-not-for-everyone","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jobbinghood.com\/magazine\/2019\/11\/02\/good-news-for-older-americans-70-is-the-new-60-but-not-for-everyone\/","title":{"rendered":"Good news for older Americans: 70 is the new 60 (but not for everyone)"},"content":{"rendered":"<p> [ad_1]<br \/>\n<\/p>\n<div id=\"article-body\" itemprop=\"articleBody\">\n<p>Americans are, on average, living longer and staying healthier for longer, too. <\/p>\n<p>Better living conditions, easier work, and better health care are all helping shave years off our effective ages, researchers have said. The progress is steady and consistent, they have found. A typical American woman of 67 today is about as healthy as her mom was at age 60, and at 89 she\u2019s likely to be as healthy as her mom was at 75, the report released this week said. <\/p>\n<p>Health-wise, older people are 10 years younger than their grandparents. \u201cA 70-year-old born in 1960 is predicted to be about as healthy as a 60-year-old born in 1910,\u201d the authors wrote. The authors, Ana-Lucia Abeliansky, Devil Erel and Holger Strulik, economists and statisticians at the University of Goettingen in Germany, crunched medical data on thousands of Americans. <\/p>\n<p>They analyzed 178,000 native-born Americans during 13 waves of the RAND Health and Retirement Study, a survey conducted roughly biennially since 1992. They looked at a broad panel of indicators to see how people were aging from independent living to walking several blocks, and included whether respondents had arthritis, or had a stroke.<\/p>\n<p>Their research found a slow and steady decline in these observed health problems of approximately 1% per year. From 1950 to 2000, average life expectancy has risen more in Western Europe than in the U.S. Europeans have gained 11.3 years, on average, compared with 8.6 years for Americans.<\/p>\n<p>Health experts typically attribute the improving life expectancy over generations to factors including more accessible health care, awareness about the benefits of exercise and nutrition, the ongoing decline in cigarette smoking, more widespread vaccination, improvements in medical science to detect and treat conditions like heart disease and cancer, and better housing conditions and improved sanitation.<\/p>\n<p>However, the researchers said older African-American have not seen the same gains. \u201cElderly African-American men seem not to benefit from generally improving health status,\u201d they said. Access to adequate health care is one major factor, they added. \u201dOur result is consistent with the view that there is discrimination but it is [not] causal evidence of it,\u201d Strulik told MarketWatch. <\/p>\n<p>Past studies have found, for instance, that African-Americans are less likely than whites to get optimal medical treatment when being treated in <a href=\"https:\/\/www.sciencedirect.com\/science\/article\/pii\/S2213177918301938?via%3Dihub\" target=\"_new\" class=\"icon \" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">intensive care units<\/a> or <a href=\"https:\/\/ps.psychiatryonline.org\/doi\/10.1176\/appi.ps.201800223\" target=\"_new\" class=\"icon \" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">behavioral health clinics<\/a>. What\u2019s more, a recent study also found African-American men were more likely to put off visits to the doctors for preventive care,<a href=\"https:\/\/www.tandfonline.com\/doi\/full\/10.1080\/08964289.2019.1585327\" target=\"_new\" class=\"icon \" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"> citing racism and mistrust<\/a> of the medical system.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<p>[ad_2]<br \/><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>[ad_1] Americans are, on average, living longer and staying healthier for longer, too. Better living conditions, easier work, and better health care are all helping shave years off our effective ages, researchers have said. The progress is steady and consistent, they have found. A typical American woman of 67 today is about as healthy as [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":348,"featured_media":1170,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1169","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-featured"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jobbinghood.com\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1169","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jobbinghood.com\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jobbinghood.com\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jobbinghood.com\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/348"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jobbinghood.com\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1169"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/jobbinghood.com\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1169\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jobbinghood.com\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1170"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jobbinghood.com\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1169"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jobbinghood.com\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1169"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jobbinghood.com\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1169"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}