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Most Americans expect their minds and bodies to slowly fall apart with age. So do most of their doctors. A Yale University study says that expectation is not just wrong for many older adults. It turns out it may be part of what makes it come true.

Researchers found that nearly half of adults 65 and older showed measurable improvement in brain function, physical mobility, or both between their first and final assessments over up to 12 years of follow-up. People who held more positive beliefs about aging were significantly more likely to be in that improving group. That held true even for people who were already healthy and functioning well at the start. A sunnier outlook ongetting olderturned out to predict genuinely better health down the road.

The study, published inGeriatrics, cuts against what most people, and most health professionals, believe. A global survey cited in the paper found 65% of healthcare providers and 80% of laypeople falsely believed all older adults developdementia. A separate U.S. survey found 77% of Americans aged 40 and older expect their own cognition to slip. Given all that, the Yale findings land as something of a wake-up call: and raise a pointed question about whether expectations around aging might influence the very outcomes people experience later in life.

Lead author Becca R. Levy, a professor at the Yale School of Public Health and Psychology Department, has spent her career making the case that cultural attitudes aboutagingare not abstract; they have real, measurable effects on health. Her framework, Stereotype Embodiment Theory, holds that people absorb beliefs about aging early in life, through media, family, and the attitudes of institutions around them. When those beliefs are mostly negative, they tend to become self-reinforcing once a person actually gets old. When they are positive, the body appears to respond in kind.

Levy and co-author Martin D. Slade of Yale School of Medicine used data from the Health and Retirement Study, a nationally representative survey of Americans aged 50 and older supported by the National Institute on Aging and run out of the University of Michigan. Participants’ attitudes about aging were measured through a five-item questionnaire capturing things like whether they felt increasingly useless as they got older, or whether they felt as content in later life as they had been in their younger years.

Cognitive healthwas tracked using a validated 27-point phone-based test covering memory, recall, and basic math; the kind of mental tasks that reflect how someone actually functions day to day. Physical health was measured through walking speed, timed over roughly eight feet. It may sound like a small thing, but walking pace is widely used in geriatric medicine as a predictor of hospitalization, disability, and death. Some clinicians call it the “sixth vital sign.”

Two separate groups were followed for up to 12 years. The cognitive group included 11,314 participants with an average starting age of about 68. The walking-speed group included 4,638 participants with an average starting age of about 74. Both groups were slightly more than half female, mostly married, and the majority held at least ahigh school diploma.

Among those with data on both outcomes, 45.15% showed improvement in cognitive function, walking speed, or both by the end of the follow-up period. About 32% improved their cognition and 28% improved their walking speed: both figures far above the federal government’s own benchmark of 11.5% for what counts as a meaningful share of older adults showing improvement.

Positive age beliefs predicted gains in both areas even after researchers controlled for age, sex, race, education, depression, sleep problems, heart disease, diabetes, social isolation, and a genetic marker linked toAlzheimer’srisk.

Source: Drudge Report