Even though life expectancy has increased in the last two decades, researchers from Harvard University found that people have healthier lives till quite late in life.
Life expectancy has seen a sharp increase over the last few decades. According to David Cutler, the Otto Eckstein Professor of Applied Economics, there are two aspects of death and both of them have contributed to this increased life expectancy.
The first one is that science advancements have turned humans into light bulbs - they function well until one day they suddenly die. Cutler says this theory explains why most humans today lead a healthy life, right until their death. The second theory Cutler believes is that life is a series of strokes and medical care has simply gotten better at saving humans and keeping them alive for longer.
These two theories have left scientists perplexed as to which one is the right one. Irrespective of which one is true, researchers have found that people have become increasingly healthier later in life.
"With the exception of the year or two just before death, people are healthier than they used to be," Cutler said. "Effectively, the period of time in which we're in poor health is being compressed until just before the end of life. So where we used to see people who are very, very sick for the final six or seven years of their life, that's now far less common. People are living to older ages and we are adding healthy years, not debilitated ones."
For the new study, researchers looked at data collected between 1991 and 2009 from nearly 90,000 individuals who responded to the Medicare Current Beneficiary Survey (MCBS). They then compared the data with survey responses on how well people were able to care for themselves later in life.
He found that some conditions that led to poorer quality of life among older adults were less debilitating in current times than in the past. He hopes to conduct further studies to find out the reasons for this.
