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UNIVERSITY PARK, Pennsylvania — According to new research from Penn State and Texas State University, baby boomers are more likely to live with multiple chronic health conditions than previous generations.
The study’s authors warn that the growing rate of multiple chronic diseases (multimorbidity) among older Americans poses a real health threat to the nation. If it continues, this trend will almost certainly place greater strains on older adult welfare, medical infrastructure, and federal insurance systems. In this context, the number of Americans over 65 is projected to increase by a staggering 50 percent by 2050.
Researchers note that this isn’t the first study to point to greater declining health among today’s older adults. In the future, they want to see their findings help inform new policies that address this nationwide issue.
“Even before the COVID-19 pandemic, we began to see a decline in life expectancy among middle-aged Americans, reversing a trend that had been going on for more than a century,” says Steven Haas, associate professor of sociology and demography at Penn State, in a statement. “Furthermore, population health in the United States has fallen behind other high-income countries over the past 30 years, and our results suggest that the United States is likely to continue to underperform our peers.”
The study authors analyzed data from adults aged 51 years and older, originally collected from the Health and Retirement Study, which is a nationally representative survey of aging Americans. Multimorbidity was measured by looking for nine chronic conditions: heart disease, hypertension, stroke, diabetes, arthritis, lung disease, cancer (excluding skin cancer), major depressive symptoms, and cognitive impairment. Variations in the specific conditions driving generational differences in multimorbidity have also been examined.
Baby Boomers in Worse Health Than Depression-Era Americans?
Ultimately, the researchers concluded that younger generations of older adults are more likely to live with chronic conditions and develop these problems earlier in life.
“If you compare, for example, those born between 1948 and 1965 – the so-called baby boomers – with those who were born at a similar age in the later years of the Great Depression (between 1931 and 1941),” adds Prof. Haas, “they have Baby boomers exhibited a greater number of chronic illnesses. Baby boomers also reported having two or more chronic health problems at a younger age.”
Remarkably, sociodemographic factors also seem to influence the risk of multimorbidity across all generations. Examples include race and ethnicity, whether the person was born in the United States, childhood socioeconomic status, and childhood health.
The most common diseases in adults with multimorbidity (across all generations) were arthritis and hypertension. In addition, some accumulated evidence suggests that both major depressive symptoms and diabetes contributed to the observed generational differences in multimorbidity risk.
Study authors say there are several possible explanations for these results.
“Later-born generations have had access to more advanced modern medicine for a longer period of their lives, so we can assume they enjoy better health than those born to earlier generations,” concludes Nicholas Bishop, an assistant professor at Texas State University. “While this is partially true, advanced medical treatments may allow people to live with multiple chronic conditions that would once have proved fatal, potentially increasing a person’s likelihood of suffering from multimorbidity.”
Prof Bishops adds that today’s older adults are “more” exposed to health risk factors such as obesity. Health problems are now more likely to be diagnosed in older adults thanks to improvements in medical technology.
The study was published in The Journals of Gerontology.
