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Are disability rates improving? And if they are, why?

Posted by kmancer on June 21st, 2010

Many people (myself included) share the view that disability rates among the seniors’ population have been declining. For example, here’s a headline from a National Association of Aging document dated May, 2001: Dramatic Decline in Disability Continues for Older Americans. And what’s the evidence? Between 1994 and 1999, the percentage of Americans over the age of 65 with disabilities declined by 2.6% per year.

In answer to the obvious question: “why”?, the article suggests several possible reasons—improvements in maternal health early in the 20th Century;  better control of infectious childhood diseases; behavioural changes such as declines in the incidence of smoking; better management of diseases such as hypertension;  better drugs; and even increases in education levels.

But a recent article in Public Policy and Aging Report suggests that declines in disability rates are due not to medical science, but to “disability-friendly” environmental changes including curb cuts, disabled access ramps and elevators, and transportation services. Improvements in assistive devices (walkers, wheelchairs, scooters) have also enabled people with mobility impairments to get around better on their own.

The Public Policy and Aging Report article is focused mostly on physical impairments that impede a person’s ability to interact with the built and social environment but it also refers briefly to the positive impact of higher education levels on rates of cognitive impairment.

It is interesting to think about this. Disability is not defined as an impairment per se, but as a “social construct insofar as it reflects the ease or difficulty that individuals with physical impairments experience interacting with the built and social environment.”

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This entry was posted on Monday, June 21st, 2010 at 4:31 pm and is filed under Future, Senior Housing, Seniors' Housing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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