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Contrary to stereotypes, many older adults improve in cognitive and physical abilities in later life - and having a positive mindset about aging may play a key role, according to a recent study by Yale researchers.
The findings, published last month in the journal Geriatrics, reject the common narrative that physical and cognitive declines are inevitable with aging. It found that about 45% of U.S. adults 65 and older showed improvement in cognition or walking speed, or both, in the 12-year study period.
Nearly 32% of participants improved their cognition and 28% improved their walking speed - an important indicator of physical function - according to the study, which included about 11,000 older adults from the Health and Retirement Study, a federally supported longitudinal survey of older Americans.
For another share of participants, cognition and physical function stayed the same - bringing the total to 51% who remained stable or improved in cognition, and 38% who remained stable or improved in walking speed.
Those with positive views and beliefs on aging were more likely to show improvement in both cognition and walking speed, the researchers found. This is in line with what's known as the stereotype embodiment theory - the idea that individuals internalize positive and negative beliefs from media and other environmental sources starting at a young age. Those beliefs become self-relevant in later life, and can predict better or worse health outcomes.
The findings challenge the assumption that older adults who improve in cognitive and physical functions in later life are the rare exception. While cognitive and physical function did decline on average in the study population, a significant number of people improved, even after accounting for factors like age, sex, mental health, education and chronic diseases.
"Many people equate aging with an inevitable and continuous loss of physical and cognitive abilities," said Becca Levy, the study's lead author and a professor of social and behavioral sciences at Yale School of Public Health, in a statement. "What we found is that improvement in later life is not rare, it's common, and it should be included in our understanding of the aging process."
This reinforces the idea that aging plays out differently in different people, and that individuals have some power to shape their own aging trajectory.
Improvements in cognition and physical function may be linked to changes in life circumstances. For instance, some older adults may have more time in retirement to be more socially and physically engaged, which could help their overall health.
"The great story is that there's so much variance in aging trajectories," said Elissa Epel, a professor of psychiatry at UCSF who researches aging and stress and was not involved in the study. "Our lifestyles, our decisions, our mental health shape our aging biology and functional abilities in an ongoing and iterative way. Aging is much more malleable and plastic than we ever thought."
Beliefs about aging - positive or negative - are modifiable, which opens the door to interventions at the individual and societal level, Levy said.
"Our findings underscore the need to instill or magnify the positivity of age beliefs and to redefine aging so that it includes the possibility of improvement," the researchers wrote.
"This has very exciting implications because we can adopt more positive views of aging simply by visualizing someone you know that manifests optimal longevity," Epel said.
