The effects of they "ageing population" are unlikely to be as challenging as previously thought, experts claimed today.
Surprisingly, the number of dependent older people in the UK has actually been falling in recent years, write Professor John MacInnes and Dr Jeroen Spijker of Edinburgh University, UK.
They report in the British Medical Journal that the currently used measures of population ageing are misleading.
"The extent, speed, and effect of population ageing have been exaggerated because the standard indicator – the old age dependency ratio – does not take account of falling mortality," they write.
Instead, when old age dependency is measured using remaining life expectancy, it "turns out to have fallen substantially in the UK and elsewhere over recent decades, and is likely to stabilise in the UK close to its current level".
The ageing population is a concern for policy makers because more older people means greater demands on social insurance, health, and welfare systems. But older people are now "younger", healthier, and fitter than in earlier times. Many are still working, mostly part-time, and at least some forms of disability are being postponed to later ages.
So if the dependent older population is defined differently, as the number of people with 15 years or less of remaining life expectancy divided by the number of people in employment, then "dependency has fallen by one third over the past four decades", they say.
This has several important implications for health policy and clinical practice, write the experts.
"We should not assume that population ageing itself will strain health and social care systems," they state. "Medical staff will need to stay alert to the changing relation between ‘old’ and ‘age’."
Spijker, J. and MacInnes, J. Population ageing: the timebomb that isn’t? BMJ 13 November 2013 doi: 10.1136/bmj.f6598 [abstract]
Leave a Reply