By Julie E 
Photo Credit (Gettyimages)
People in their seventies now tend to be healthier and happier than their counterparts in the same age group twenty years earlier.
Cognitive functioning and overall well-being are higher among older persons now compared to those of the same age 20 years ago. In a joint investigation, researchers from various Berlin institutions—the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Charité-Universitätsmedizin Berlin, the Max Planck Institute for Human Development (MPIB), and the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP)—discovered this. The scientific publication “Psychology and Aging” will publish the result.
Those who are anxious about ageing can take heart in the following: Age is passing quickly. The average cognitive fitness of 75-year-olds now is significantly higher than that of 75-year-olds 20 years ago. Also, compared to previous generations, today’s 75-year-olds express more happiness and contentment with life. “The gains in cognitive functioning and well-being that we have measured here in Berlin are considerable and of great significance for life quality in old age,” observes Ulman Lindenberger, Director of the Center for Lifespan Psychology at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development. The benefits are associated with social elements like education, according to the study. Better physical health and greater degrees of independence in old age, in their view, also contribute to the increase in well-being.
“However, we expect that these positive historical trends are attenuated at the end of life,” adds Denis Gerstorf, Professor for Developmental Psychology at the Department of Psychology, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. As we near the end of our lives, we may expect our cognitive abilities and general health to decline sharply after years of steady improvement. Recent research on the final years of life by Gerstorf and colleagues provides credence to this idea.
Researchers from several Berlin institutions are working together on this massive study: Charité-Universitätsmedizin Berlin, the German Institute for Economic Research (DIW Berlin), the Max Planck Institute for Human Development, and Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. The data used for the publication came from a comparison between the Berlin Aging Studies (BASE and BASE-II) and the representative German SOEP data (for more on this, see “Method” below). “The combination of data for a large city, in this case Berlin, with data representative for the whole of Germany (SOEP) is an important feature of BASE und BASE-II,” underlines Gert G. Wagner, Executive Board Member of the DIW Berlin and Max Planck Fellow at the MPIB.
The data was derived from 708 older Berliners (60 and up) who participated in the Berlin Aging Study II and were assessed for cognitive performance and well-being. The data were compared with those from the Berlin Aging Study, which was conducted in the early 1990s. From this comparison, 161 individuals were identified as “statistical twins,” with each study including one person of the same sex who was as similarly aged and educated as could be. We also took into account factors like medically diagnosed diseases. The ages of the people in these comparison couples ranged from 65 to 89, with an average age of 75. The researchers also considered data from the SOEP study at the DIW Berlin, which has been collecting representative German population data for 30 years, to ensure comparability.