Aging and society
Young people tend to have fewer legal privileges (if they are below the age of majority), they are more likely to push for political and social change, to develop and adopt new technologies, and to need education.
People in these cultures may find more importance in other aspects of their birth, such as the season, agricultural practices,[6] or spiritual connections[7] taking place when they were born.
A culture may also choose to place a greater emphasis on family lineage than age, as is done in Mayan society.
A Mayan adult would not determine a child's responsibility and status in terms of age by years, but instead by relative seniority to others in the family or community.
The medical practices and compulsory schooling that resulted from industrialization factored largely into the need to count age in terms of years since birth.
[5] Depending on cultural and personal philosophy, ageing can be seen as an undesirable phenomenon, reducing beauty and bringing one closer to death, or as an accumulation of wisdom, a mark of survival, and a status worthy of respect.
[12][13][14] Social support and personal control are possibly the two most important factors that predict well-being, morbidity and mortality in adults.
[17] Individuals in different wings in the same retirement home have demonstrated a lower risk of mortality and higher alertness and self-rated health in the wing where residents had greater control over their environment,[18][19] though personal control may have less impact on specific measures of health.
[25] This finding is generally stronger for men than women,[24] though the pattern between genders is not universal across all studies and some results suggest sex-based differences only appear in certain age groups, for certain causes of mortality and within a specific sub-set of self-ratings of health.
The large number of suggestions in the literature for specific interventions to cope with the expected increase in demand for long-term care in ageing societies can be organised under four headings: improve system performance; redesign service delivery; support informal caregivers; and shift demographic parameters.
[32] However, the annual growth in national health spending is not mainly due to increasing demand from ageing populations, but rather has been driven by rising incomes, costly new medical technology, a shortage of health care workers and informational asymmetries between providers and patients.
Even so, it has been estimated that population ageing only explains 0.2 percentage points of the annual growth rate in medical spending of 4.3 percent since 1970.
In addition, certain reforms to the Medicare system in the United States decreased elderly spending on home health care by 12.5 percent per year between 1996 and 2000.
[35] As Taiwan heads into an ageing society, a study in the city of Kaoshiung suggests that compared to their parents, the current generation of adults has shown a greater interest in age-friendly housing of high-quality building materials and community environment.
[36] The poor living conditions for the elderly was exposed after a fire in the city tore through multiple stories of a dilapidated apartment block.
[4][38] Other research shows that even late in life, the potential exists for physical, mental, and social growth and development.
The Meta Data Repository – created by the non-profit RAND Corporation and sponsored by the National Institute on Aging at the National Institutes of Health – provides access to metadata for these questions as well as links to obtain respondent data from the originating surveys.
[citation needed] Recent studies utilizing artificial intelligence showed that in order to stay biologically younger and lower the chances of most age-related diseases, people should not be unhappy and lonely.
Changes in cognition, hearing, and vision are easily associated with healthy ageing and can cause problems when diagnosing dementia and aphasia due to the similarities.
Common conditions that can increase the risk of hearing loss in elderly people are high blood pressure, diabetes, or the use of certain medications that are harmful to the ear.
[45] Hearing loss among the aged community lessens elders' ability to compensate for other age-related social and/or physical problems.
[47] This is normally caused by long periods of distressing noise that diminish the hair cells which with increasing age will not grow back.
Hearing loss among the aged community lessens elders' ability to compensate for other age-related social and/or physical problems.
[47] This impairment can cause elders to lose touch of social skills because they may have trouble keeping up with fast-paced or hearing different pitched voices in conversation.
Such problems hinder the ability of people to understand stimuli and translate information pertaining to perception with their brain for analysis.
Though ageing almost always causes this, other possible effects and risk factors include smoking, obesity, family history, and excessive sunlight exposure.
