A newly-published report has found that persons who live to an advanced age are more likely to require assistance with activities of daily living (ADL). Defining disability as requiring assistance with an ADL, researchers found the prevalence of disability increased from 14 percent among people who died at ages 50 to 69, to 50 percent of those who died at ages 90 or older.
A team of researchers from the University of California, San Francisco, set out to determine national estimates of disability during the last two years of life. They analyzed data collected from the Health and Retirement Study (HRS), which included 8,232 participants who died from January 1995 through December 2010.
The prevalence of disability among participants increased greatly during the last two years of life. Two years prior to passing, 46 percent had difficulty performing ADLs, while 28 percent had a disability and 12 percent had a severe disability. By the last month of life, those percentages jumped to 68 percent, 56 percent, and 40 percent, respectively.
Overall, women were found to experience a 50 percent greater risk of disability during the last two years of life than men.
With the population of U.S. adults older than 85 years expected to triple from 5.4 million to 19 million between 2008 and 2050, it is inevitable that more caregivers and senior living communities will be needed to care for older adults who develop disabilities.
“It is important for our healthcare system and society to plan better for the increase in end-of-life disability that is inevitable in an aging population. Our healthcare systems are designed to pay for disease management and are sorely unprepared to meet the needs that stem from disability,” the authors concluded.
Read the article: Older Age Associated With Disability Prior To Death, Women More At Risk Than Men or purchase the full study: Disability During the Last Two Years of Life.
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