Active Aging: A Global Goal

Copyright © 2013 Rocío Fernández-Ballesteros et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Throughout the world, populations are growing older; although in developed countries population Aging started early in the XX century 1, less developed countries begun more recently. Therefore, it can be stated that population Aging is a global phenomenon. Population Aging must be considered as a success of the human race since it is the product of a long adaptation process, that is, we are coincident with that the increase in life expectancy has been determined by the development of lifelong education, biomedical advancements, socioeconomic progress, and the democratic political extension of these social developments, which in some countries has doubled life expectancy in under a century. Nevertheless, since individual Aging is associated with illness and functional loss, and disability-free life expectancy (DFLE) is significantly lower than life expectancy at birth (LE), this global demographic transformation, sometimes called " the silent revolution, " is considered by many as a threat in terms of public health and economic costs. But, life expectancy with disability (LEwD) shows a very broad variability among the world: while in some countries an individual born in 2002 can expect to have 10 years in poor health, in others countries this expectation is reduced to less than 7 years. Differences both in LE and in LEwD are expressing the extent to which there are inequalities in environmental conditions which, to a large extent, account for the variability in the ways populations are Aging. From a population perspective, the new paradigm of successful Aging, or Aging well, started in the eighties based on the compression of morbidity as a key concept for the development of this new paradigm in contrast with the common understanding that longevity necessarily increases morbidity 2, 3, or produced a dynamic equilibrium (4, for a review see 5). Latterly, authors noted how, since the 1950s, in selected countries, mortality after the age of 80 years has steadily fallen, they showed evidence that human senescence has been delayed by a decade strongly associated (from 1850) with behavioral and healthy " best practices " 6, 7. Aging is not only a population phenomenon but also an individual reality and experience. Biogerontologists stated that while a 25% of the ways individuals …