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AGING: WE AGE DIFFERENTLY
Not only is it wrong to label all eighty-five-year-olds \"infirm,\" it is also untrue that at fifty everyone is physically middle-aged. Because of poor genetics, an unhealthful life-style, or bad luck, some fifty-year-olds function as if they were eighty; even some forty-year-olds are physically old.
In our nation\'s most comprehensive study of physical aging, now going on at the National Institute on Aging laboratories in Baltimore, researchers are finding that as we grow older making physical generalizations based on chronological age becomes harder and harder. As the years advance, we become increasingly different from our contemporaries in our health and physical capacities. Ironically, by our sixties, the very time of life when we are lumped together as \'\' senior citizens,\'\' the variations in aging rates are so striking that assigning any label seems particularly wrong.
Being older is usually an abstraction; there are so few changes in the way I feel. My back has begun to bother me more, and I can\'t see as easily or as well. But my energy level was always high, and I still can get around just as well. With some extra effort I still look almost the same as twenty years ago. It\'s more trouble to keep the weight off and cover that deep line I noticed last year. But I am mistaken for closer to forty than my real age, sixty-eight.
I am aware of approaching seventy only when I look at friends. There are such shocking differences in how old we look, and this is the time of life when our ranks begin to thin. Last week we went out to dinner with a couple, and the woman - a few years younger than me - had had a stroke and was in a wheelchair. I thought she looked more like my mother. I wondered at my incredible good luck.
How old or young we look is a fascinating clue to our rate of aging. In the National Institute on Aging study, researchers find that people who look middle-aged at seventy are more likely to be aging slowly internally too. But they caution that there is little relation between how we appear and how we function, mainly because making generalizations such as \"he is young (or old) for his age\" is so difficult. Our body systems themselves age at different rates. At sixty our heart may be physiologically eighty while our kidneys are like those of a thirty-year-old.
In other words, aging advances very differently - both between people and within us. However, there are some generalizations we can make: the process itself occurs in definite ways. What exactly are these ways? This landmark National Institute on Aging study - called the Baltimore Longitudinal Study of Aging - offers answers to this question too.
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GENERAL HEALTH
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