Medical and social transformations in an aging world

How do we know and live old age today? What does it mean to be old in a time of the promise of high-tech medical interventions? Anthropologists and sociologists address the phenomenon of growing old both as experienced by individuals and their families and by the ways in which older lives are embedded in social, historical and political contexts. In recent decades a multitude of factors ensure that the very ideas of „aging‟ and „health‟ in late life are being transformed. As a result, many social scientists have turned their attention to global developments in the spread of biomedical knowledge, the impacts of high-tech interventions on the practice of medicine in an aging world and shifting societal expectations about longevity. The world population is growing older. The proportion of those over ۸۰ and ۹۰ is increasing worldwide, along with the chronic illnesses that accompany later life. Those over ۸۵, including centenarians, are the most rapidly growing age group in Japan, the U.S., Canada and most of Europe. Even so, the absolute numbers of individuals over ۸۵ is growing fastest in the developing world (۱). While developing countries still face enormous challenges in the face of infectious diseases, those challenges are now accompanied by a growing older population with chronic ills – for example, cardiac disease, cancer, diabetes and the dementias. Thus there is now a double burden on poor countries, whose leaders must decide how to apportion limited health care resources. In affluent countries the cost of drugs, other treatments and health care services continues to rise, posing scenarios of economic unsustainability for governments and social welfare systems.