Yale Study Finds Nearly Half of Older Adults Actually Improve With Age

A new study by scientists at Yale University suggests that older individuals can and do ‘improve,’ in all the senses of that word, over time.

Analyzing the results of a large study of older Americans that ran for a decade, a key data point was that the individual’s mindset toward aging plays a major part in their success.

If they believed aging was a process of decline, they declined. If they believed aging was a process of refinement, they improved.

Lead author Dr. Becca R. Levy, PhD, a professor of social and behavioral sciences at the Yale School of Public Health (YSPH) found that nearly half of adults aged 65 and older showed measurable improvement in cognitive function, physical function, or both, over time.

The improvements were not limited to a small group of exceptional individuals and, notably, were linked to a powerful but often overlooked factor: how people think about aging itself.

“Many people equate aging with an inevitable and continuous loss of physical and cognitive abilities,” said Dr. Levy, an international expert on psychosocial determinants of aging health. “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.”

The findings are published in the journal Geriatrics.

For the study, the researchers followed more than 11,000 participants in the Health and Retirement Study, a federally supported longitudinal survey of older Americans. The research team tracked changes in cognition using a global performance assessment, and physical function using walking speed—often described by geriatricians as a “vital sign” because of its strong links to disability, hospitalization, and mortality.

Over a follow-up period of up to 12 years, 45% of participants improved in at least one of the two domains, according to the study. About 32% improved cognitively, 28% improved physically, and many experienced gains that exceeded thresholds considered clinically meaningful.

When participants whose cognitive scores remained stable over that period (rather than declining) were included, more than half defied the stereotype of inevitable deterioration in cognition.

“What’s striking is that these gains disappear when you only look at averages,” said Dr. Levy, author of the book Breaking the Age Code: How Your Beliefs About Aging Determine How Long & How Well You Live .

“If you average everyone together, you see decline,” Dr. Levy continued. “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.”