Enjoying Your 90s

A lot of people assume that once you live past 80 or so, both your physical and mental abilities decline and you have an inactive happy life. Recent research is showing that’s no longer the case. Improvements have been made in many areas, so that people who live past 90 have much better physical and mental abilities than their predecessors. Living longer, it appears, is not something to be feared but is worth looking forward to.

In the Danish study, stronger, sharper mental agility among today’s 90 year-olds was marked compared with the earlier group. That’s significant because improved cognition at very old age goes against expectations there will be a sharp rise in dementia among people over 80, Marcel Olde Rikkert and Rene Melis of Radboud University Nijmegen Medical Centre in Nijmegen, Netherlands, wrote in a commentary about the study.

“We have to change our image of aging,” Rikkert said in a phone interview. “It’s not being old and decrepit at 90; it’s being old and active.”