IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/oup/geronb/v72y2017i1p151-161..html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Disability Rises Gradually for a Cohort of Older Americans

Author

Listed:
  • Lois M. Verbrugge
  • Dustin C. Brown
  • Anna Zajacova

Abstract

Objectives:We study changes in average disability over nearly two decades for a large epidemiological cohort of older Americans. As some people exit by mortality, do average disability levels for the living cohort rise rapidly, rise gradually, stay steady, or decline?Method:Data are from the Study of Asset and Health Dynamics Among the Oldest Old (AHEAD) cohort for 1993–2010. Cohort members are aged 70+ in 1993 (mean = 77.5 years), and the survivors are aged 87+ in 2010 (mean = 90.2 years). Personal care disability (activities of daily living), household management disability (instrumental activities of daily living), and physical limitations are studied. We study average disability for the living cohort over time and the disability histories for decedent and survivor groups.Results:Average disability rises gradually over time for the living cohort. Earlier decedent groups have higher average disability than later ones. Near death, disability rises sharply for all decedent groups. Longer surviving groups have less average disability, and slower disability increases, than shorter surviving groups. All results are repeated for younger cohort members (baseline age = 70–79 years), older ones (baseline age = 80+ years), women, and men.Discussion:As a cohort ages, average disability among living members increases gradually, signaling behavioral, psychological, and biological fitness in very old persons.

Suggested Citation

  • Lois M. Verbrugge & Dustin C. Brown & Anna Zajacova, 2017. "Disability Rises Gradually for a Cohort of Older Americans," The Journals of Gerontology: Series B, The Gerontological Society of America, vol. 72(1), pages 151-161.
    • Handle: RePEc:oup:geronb:v:72:y:2017:i:1:p:151-161.
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/geronb/gbw002
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Philippa Clarke & Jacqui Smith, 2011. "Aging in a Cultural Context: Cross-national Differences in Disability and the Moderating Role of Personal Control Among Older Adults in the United States and England," The Journals of Gerontology: Series B, The Gerontological Society of America, vol. 66(4), pages 457-467.
    2. Torrance J. Higgins & Christopher M. Janelle & Todd M. Manini, 2014. "Diving Below the Surface of Progressive Disability: Considering Compensatory Strategies as Evidence of Sub-Clinical Disability," The Journals of Gerontology: Series B, The Gerontological Society of America, vol. 69(2), pages 263-274.
    3. James Vaupel & Kenneth Manton & Eric Stallard, 1979. "The impact of heterogeneity in individual frailty on the dynamics of mortality," Demography, Springer;Population Association of America (PAA), vol. 16(3), pages 439-454, August.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Keith T. Chan & Carl Algood & Andreana Prifti & Tarek Zidan, 2021. "Cross-Cultural Measurement Invariance of a Measure of Disability for White, Black, Hispanic and Asian Older Adults," IJERPH, MDPI, vol. 18(4), pages 1-14, February.
    2. Nico Keilman & Dinh Q. Pham & Astri Syse, 2018. "Mortality shifts and mortality compression. The case of Norway, 1900-2060," Discussion Papers 884, Statistics Norway, Research Department.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Bagdonavicius, Vilijandas & Nikulin, Mikhail, 2000. "On goodness-of-fit for the linear transformation and frailty models," Statistics & Probability Letters, Elsevier, vol. 47(2), pages 177-188, April.
    2. Ruth Hancock & Marcello Morciano & Stephen Pudney & Francesca Zantomio, 2015. "Do household surveys give a coherent view of disability benefit targeting?: a multisurvey latent variable analysis for the older population in Great Britain," Journal of the Royal Statistical Society Series A, Royal Statistical Society, vol. 178(4), pages 815-836, October.
    3. Feehan, Dennis & Wrigley-Field, Elizabeth, 2020. "How do populations aggregate?," SocArXiv 2fkw3, Center for Open Science.
    4. K. Motarjem & M. Mohammadzadeh & A. Abyar, 2020. "Geostatistical survival model with Gaussian random effect," Statistical Papers, Springer, vol. 61(1), pages 85-107, February.
    5. Xu, Linzhi & Zhang, Jiajia, 2010. "An EM-like algorithm for the semiparametric accelerated failure time gamma frailty model," Computational Statistics & Data Analysis, Elsevier, vol. 54(6), pages 1467-1474, June.
    6. Annamaria Olivieri & Ermanno Pitacco, 2016. "Frailty and Risk Classification for Life Annuity Portfolios," Risks, MDPI, vol. 4(4), pages 1-23, October.
    7. James W. Vaupel, 2002. "Post-Darwinian longevity," MPIDR Working Papers WP-2002-043, Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, Rostock, Germany.
    8. Maxim S. Finkelstein, 2005. "Shocks in homogeneous and heterogeneous populations," MPIDR Working Papers WP-2005-024, Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, Rostock, Germany.
    9. Luping Zhao & Timothy E. Hanson, 2011. "Spatially Dependent Polya Tree Modeling for Survival Data," Biometrics, The International Biometric Society, vol. 67(2), pages 391-403, June.
    10. Yeo, Keng Leong & Valdez, Emiliano A., 2006. "Claim dependence with common effects in credibility models," Insurance: Mathematics and Economics, Elsevier, vol. 38(3), pages 609-629, June.
    11. Hui Zheng, 2014. "Aging in the Context of Cohort Evolution and Mortality Selection," Demography, Springer;Population Association of America (PAA), vol. 51(4), pages 1295-1317, August.
    12. Graziella Caselli & Franco Peracchi & Elisabetta Barbi & Rosa Maria Lipsi, 2003. "Differential Mortality and the Design of the Italian System of Public Pensions," LABOUR, CEIS, vol. 17(s1), pages 45-78, August.
    13. Enrique Acosta & Alain Gagnon & Nadine Ouellette & Robert R. Bourbeau & Marilia R. Nepomuceno & Alyson A. van Raalte, 2020. "The boomer penalty: excess mortality among baby boomers in Canada and the United States," MPIDR Working Papers WP-2020-003, Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, Rostock, Germany.
    14. Zhang, Zhehao, 2018. "Renewal sums under mixtures of exponentials," Applied Mathematics and Computation, Elsevier, vol. 337(C), pages 281-301.
    15. Hess Wolfgang & Tutz Gerhard & Gertheiss Jan, 2016. "A Flexible Link Function for Discrete-Time Duration Models," Journal of Economics and Statistics (Jahrbuecher fuer Nationaloekonomie und Statistik), De Gruyter, vol. 236(4), pages 455-481, August.
    16. Bas Klaauw & Limin Wang, 2011. "Child mortality in rural India," Journal of Population Economics, Springer;European Society for Population Economics, vol. 24(2), pages 601-628, April.
    17. Xian Liu, 2000. "Development of a Structural Hazard Rate Model in Sociological Research," Sociological Methods & Research, , vol. 29(1), pages 77-117, August.
    18. Hsieh Fushing, 2012. "Semiparametric efficient inferences for lifetime regression model with time-dependent covariates," Annals of the Institute of Statistical Mathematics, Springer;The Institute of Statistical Mathematics, vol. 64(1), pages 1-25, February.
    19. M S Finkelstein, 2008. "Reliability modelling for biological ageing," Journal of Risk and Reliability, , vol. 222(1), pages 1-6, March.
    20. Cizek, P. & Lei, J. & Ligthart, J.E., 2012. "The Determinants of VAT Introduction : A Spatial Duration Analysis," Other publications TiSEM 835efbcb-4537-4dab-aaa3-c, Tilburg University, School of Economics and Management.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:oup:geronb:v:72:y:2017:i:1:p:151-161.. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Oxford University Press (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://academic.oup.com/psychsocgerontology .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.