| Paul Kleyman

| Aging Isn’t a Downhill Slide. Cognitive, Physical Improvement Common.

| A revelatory new study in the journal Geriatrics finds that nearly half of people ages 65-plus (45.15%) “showed measurable improvement in cognitive function, physical function, or both, over time.”

“If this finding was extrapolated to the entire U.S. population,” writes Becca R. Levy, Ph.D., principal investigator of “Aging Redefined: Cognitive and Physical Improvement with Positive Age Beliefs,” “it would suggest that more than 26 million older persons are experiencing an improvement in functioning.”

Levy, author of Breaking the Age Code: How Your Beliefs About Aging Determine How Long & Well You Live (2022), is best known for her milestone 2002 study demonstrating that people with very upbeat views of aging as they approach elderhood live on average 7.5 years longer than those with exceptionally dim views of later life. The new study emerged from her extensive subsequent research demonstrating that negativity about aging, which is reinforced by health and service professionals, media ageism, and age-deprecating public attitudes, can be reversed, such as with age-positive training exercises, among many older adults.

The new article states, “We debunked the age belief that later life is a time of inevitable and universal decline.” The research team (Levy is with the Yale School of Public Health, and Martin D. Slade, MPH, PhD, is on the faculty of Yale Medical School) challenges conventional health status measures of older adults, notably the World Health Organization’s (WHO) assessment tool for cognitive and physical capacities in later life. That measure only shows whether a person has declined, while not allowing “for the possibility of improvement.”

Findings Based on 12 Years of Data

The “Aging Redefined” study emphasizes, “A widespread assumption exists among scientists, health care providers, and the public that later life is a time of inevitable and universal cognitive and physical decline. This assumption is likely due to considering older persons who improve to be exceptions, and the reliance on aging-health measures that do not allow for improvement.” They assert that this negative “predominant narrative . . . needs to be reconsidered.”

The longitudinal study, conducted over 12 years, includes a large, nationally representative study of older Americans drawn from the Health and Retirement Study (HRS) and was funded by the National Institute on Aging. Participants remained in the study for 10 years, on average.

Significantly, the study evaluations were not merely calculated from self-reported surveys but were based on actual tests. The physical functioning cohort consisted of 4,638 participants. The latter group was tested for their walking-speed, a widely applied proxy for multiple capacities as people age.

The cognitive analyses included 11,314 older adults, whom the investigators evaluated  periodically over the years such established research tools as the 27-point Telephone Interview for Cognitive Status (TICS), “a global measure . . . that covers a range of cognitive domains, including short-term memory, delayed recall, and mathematical skills.”

And by applying the Attitude Toward Aging section of the Philadelphia Geriatric Center Morale Scale (e.g., The older I get, the more useless I feel and I am as happy now as I was when I was younger), Levy and Slade determined who had more positive, middling or negative views of growing older. Consequentially, the “Aging Redefined” study marks the first time researchers have considered “whether positive age beliefs predicted this potential improvement.”

“For the first time,” wrote Levy and Slade, their research demonstrates that participants who had assimilated more-positive age beliefs were more likely to show improvement in both cognitive and physical function. In fact, the new study demonstrated that those with more positive age beliefs were significantly more likely to show improvements in both cognition and walking speed, even after accounting for factors such as age, sex, education, chronic disease, depression, and length of follow-up.”

The authors wrote, “We found 32% improved their cognition, and 28% improved their walking speed.” When they included people who remained stable, neither improving nor declining over the years, they found that overall more than half (51%) did well mentally, while over a third (37.5%) did better or held their ground physically. Taken together, the cognitive and physical condition of study participants averaged a positive result of 45% of seniors who either improved or stabilized during the decade of the research.

Existing Research Negates Positive Aging

“What’s striking is that these gains disappear when you only look at averages,” Levy said in a Yale press release. “If you average everyone together, you see decline. But when you look at individual trajectories, you uncover a very different story. A meaningful percentage of the older participants that we studied got better.”

The research team observed, “Awareness of our improvement findings . . . might overcome the unwillingness of some health care providers to offer older persons preventive and rehabilitation services, due to the assumption that they are unlikely to get better.”

Erroneous negativity about aging is so widespread that Levy and Slade cite a global survey of almost 40,000 people that found 65% of health care professionals and 80% of lay persons falsely believed that all older persons develop dementia (World Alzheimer’s Report 2024, from Alzheimer’s Disease International). What’s more, they note a 2025 AARP survey in the United States showing “that 77% of Americans aged 40 and older think that their cognition will decline” in their later years.

The “Aging Redefined” study concludes that “the predominant narrative of aging as a time of inevitable and universal decline needs to be reconsidered.”

Levy observed in the Yale press release, “What we found is that improvement in later life is not rare, it’s common, and it should be included in our understanding of the aging process.”

Paul Kleyman is National Coordinator of the Journalists Network on Generations (JNG), which he co-founded in 1993. He edits its e-newsletter, GBONews.org.