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Westendorp - Growing Older Without Feeling Old

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Westendorp Growing Older Without Feeling Old
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The past century has witnessed a revolution.

Less than a hundred years ago, the average Western life expectancy was 40; now it is 80. And there is no end in sight: the first person who will reach 135 has already been born. Its the most radical change in our society since industrialisation, and naturally it raises many questions.

What do longer life spans mean for the way we organise our societies? How can people best prepare themselves for living considerably longer? Does it help to eat less, or to take hormones, vitamins, or minerals? And what can we learn from old people who remain full of vitality, despite illness and infirmity?

Growing Older without Feeling Old is the definitive book on a key issue for the 21st century, written by one of the worlds leading experts in geriatric medicine. Combining medical, biological, economic, and sociological insights, Rudi Westendorp explores the causes of the ageing revolution and explains how we can greet it with...

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GROWING OLDER WITHOUT FEELING OLD Professor Rudi Westendorp was trained at - photo 1

GROWING OLDER WITHOUT FEELING OLD

Professor Rudi Westendorp was trained at the Leiden University Medical Centre (LUMC) in the Netherlands, and specialised in intensive care and epidemiology. Later, he focussed on geriatrics and gerontology. In 2000, he was appointed professor of medicine, and, from 2005 to 2012, he was head of the Department of Gerontology and Geriatrics at the LUMC. In 2008, he founded and became the first director of the Leyden Academy on Vitality and Ageing, a research institute that provides training, conducts research, and initiates developments in the field of vitality and ageing. In addition, since 2012, he has been director of the VITALITY! programme, part of Medical Delta, an innovative partnership of academic and public institutions, and enterprises, in the south-west of the Netherlands. In 2015, he moved his workplace to Denmark, where he was appointed Professor of Old-Age Medicine at the University of Copenhagen.

Scribe Publications
1820 Edward St, Brunswick, Victoria 3056, Australia
2 John St, Clerkenwell, London, WC1N 2ES, United Kingdom

Originally published in Dutch as Oud worden zonder het te zijn by Atlas Contact in 2014

First published in English by Scribe in 2015

Copyright Rudi Westendorp 2014

Translation copyright David Shaw 2015

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the publishers of this book.

The moral rights of the author and the translator have been asserted

National Library of Australia
Cataloguing-in-Publication data

Westendorp, Rudi, author.

Growing Older Without Feeling Old: on vitality and ageing / Rudi Westendorp.

1. AgingPrevention. 2. Older peopleHealth and hygiene. 3. LongevityHealth aspects.

613.0438

9781925106916 (AU edition)
9781925228137 (UK edition)
9781925113945 (e-book)

A CiP reference for this title is available from the British Library

scribepublications.com.au
scribepublications.co.uk

Contents

An accumulation of damage

All for the next generation

Rites of passage

Damage and repair

Longevity in families

Ageing is not necessary

The disposable soma

The cost of sex

Aristocratic fruit flies

Insurance premium levels

The impotence of prediction

An extraordinary find in Chad

The Gold Coast of Africa

Resistance to infectious disease

The benefit of grandmothers

What we used to die of

The new killers

A revolution in medical technology

An extra weekend every week

The gravedigger

From pyramid to skyscraper

Young and old-age dependency ratios

What causes cancer?

Normal ageing does not exist

The dementia epidemic

Frailty

Accelerated ageing

Oxygen radicals

Insulin and growth hormone

Should we eat less?

More years of illness

More years without impairment

The ragged end

What is healthy?

The Leiden -plus study

A rating for life

The new ages of man and woman

Optimism and zest for life

Grey is not black and white

is the new

Who is responsible for what?

A birthday rhyme

AN EXPLOSION OF LIFE

In the previous century, human existence underwent a radical change. There has been an explosion of life never before have so many people in the developed world lived for so long. It is the most drastic of the changes wrought in our society by the Industrial Revolution. Within a period of about a hundred years, average life expectancy rose from 40 to 80 years, and the likelihood of reaching the age of 65 increased three-fold, from 30 to 90 per cent. Pensioners have also made great gains; rather than ten, they can now look forward to twenty years of leisure when they retire. And then there is Madame Calment, the French lady who reached the grand old age of 122 in 1997. Babies born today can expect to live even longer; there is little doubt that some will live to be 135 years old.

All these additional years have not come to us because of a change in our bodies whether by genetic manipulation or any other means. No, our bodies are essentially the same as they always were. Our greatly increased longevity is the emphatic result of the enormous changes we have made to our environment. Unlike before, everyone in the West now has enough to eat, we have clean drinking water available straight from the tap, and many infectious diseases have been eradicated. In addition, the chance of being killed by (military) violence has been reduced to a minimum. So it is no wonder that we no longer die in childhood, and almost everyone reaches old age. Our ability to intervene ever more effectively to counteract the effects of illness or ageing means we are living even longer.

However, our emotional and social adaptation to this revolution lags very much behind. We are truly entrenched in outdated patterns. Who brings their children up in the realistic expectation that they will reach the age of 100? What parents simply shrug off the news that their son or daughter has failed to make the grade and will have to repeat a year at school? Rather than trying to prepare their children for life in the space of just twenty years, parents today should be teaching them that learning is a lifelong process, given that theyll need to be able to cope with circumstances that are constantly changing. And what will they themselves do, once their children are grown up? The time when we lived and worked solely to provide for our children, before retiring from professional and public life, is definitively over. Now, parents of children who have flown the nest wrestle with the question of how to fill the rest of their long lives.

This is not unfamiliar to me, as a 55-year-old. Longevity is partly determined by genetics, and, with a maternal grandmother who lived to 99, I may well reach the age of 90, or even 100. Horror! What am I going to do for the next twenty years, with two grown-up daughters who get along in life excellently by themselves? Of course, Im glad I didnt die young, and I look forward to a carefree old age. At the same time, I can see the end of my life looming ominously ahead, and I wonder if I will weather the storm well or not. A long life is an impressive achievement, but it is also a frightening prospect. Am I doomed to spend my final years with failing eyesight and hearing, stiff and incontinent? Or are these just the normal fears of a man in his fifties, thinking things can only go downhill from here?

Not everyone sees this increased longevity in a positive light. It makes people uneasy. Some speak of a disaster that has befallen us. There are estimates that half of the over-sixty-fives that have ever lived are currently alive today. Why has no one pulled the emergency brake? The certainties of the past have given way to prospects that do not yet appear in clear focus. And this has all happened extremely quickly. When we think of getting old, many of us look to the lives of our parents or grandparents as a beacon to help us navigate the stormy seas of life. But between the time of our grandparents and the time we become grandparents ourselves there are four generations, spanning a period of a hundred years or so. That is why it is wrong to think that we can take the life stories of our parents and grandparents as a blueprint for the way our own lives should unfold. Those images are no model for the life that awaits us. We can drink deeply from their skills and knowledge, but life moves forward, not back.

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