Stony Brook professor: Measures of aging need update

Traditional measurements of aging fail to account for today's longer life expectancy and the better health of many people age 65 and older, says a Stony Brook University professor who co-authored a study on the issue out Friday in the weekly journal Science.

"The standard measures which are used by the [United Nations] and many other agencies are too gloomy," said Warren Sanderson, co-chair of Stony Brook's Economics Department. He said those measurements are used worldwide to determine health care and retirement costs.

But, he said, "They don't take into account people are having longer lives and people are healthier, and so they show much stronger increases in aging and they suggest that aging will be a far bigger problem than it's likely to be," Sanderson said in a telephone interview Thursday.

In the article, "Remeasuring Aging," Sanderson and his co-author Sergei Scherbov, of the Vienna Institute of Demography, offer an age measurement that factors in disability.

Sanderson said the "standard way" of measuring age and its costs involve calculating the ratio of people above age 65 compared to those of working ages.

That measurement, he said, assumes that everyone age 65 and over was "old-age dependent, when many of them are actually giving care to even older people. So another way to look at it is to say, 'Let's look at who needs care compared to the number of people who are capable of giving care.' That's what our new ratio does."

In the article, Sanderson and Scherbov write: "Policy-makers now have a wider variety of aging measures available to them. When health and longevity are taken into account, measures of aging increase much less rapidly than they do when the implicit assumption is made that all improvements in health and longevity will suddenly come to a halt." They also say most health care costs come in the final few years of life, and that is coming at later ages.

"Population aging will certainly be a source of many challenges in the coming decades," they write. "But there is no reason to exaggerate those challenges through mismeasurement."