Cross-sectional and longitudinal age-associated reductions in power and isometric strength are described for the upper extremities. Over a 25-year period, repeated measures were taken approximately every 2 years from men and women in the Baltimore Longitudinal Study of Aging (BLSA). The longitudinal measures covered an average 9.6 years, range 1-25 years for men and an average 4.6 years, range 1-8 years for women. Strength and power declined beginning by age 40 in both women and men. Thereafter, power declined about 10% more than strength in men, while no significant differences were found in women. Age had a statistically independent influence on strength and power measures after adjusting for gender, height, weight, caloric expenditure, and muscle mass. Twenty-five-year longitudinal analyses in men confirmed the declines observed cross-sectionally, while no changes were observed in women over the 4-5 years of longitudinal data available. Further longitudinal studies are needed to understand the relationships between strength and power losses with age in women. The differences between power and strength changes with age in men argue for the importance of factors other than strength affecting power.
Longitudinal studies have contributed much to the understanding of aging. Traditionally, age-specific changes in physiological functioning are inferred from studies in which persons with disease processes believed to be relevant to the function in question are excluded from the results. The main theme of this review is that, in the future, studies of aging must better attempt to capture the interplay between disease and aging processes. A variety of research results, mostly from the Baltimore Longitudinal Study of Aging, are used to support this argument. Topics covered include: the role of longitudinal studies in aging research; the complexity of the aging process; the significance of cohort and secular changes for understanding both aging and disease processes; age changes over the adult life span in the significance of risk factors for disease; and age-related increases in morbidity in a longevous group of men.
Environments for aging and the aged are best designed if human factors engineers incorporate a developmental view of adulthood in their planning. Accordingly, environments for living should be designed to accommodate the transitions between stages of adult life as well as the periods of stability. The optimal human factors interventions involve both psychosocial and physical aspects of the environment and include changing people through psychological intervention. Examples of human factors engineering for aging in perception, learning, and memory, as well as work, leisure, and health, illustrate areas that require successively more complicated plans for intervention.
The speed with which normal elderly and young subjects encoded digits in a speeded same/different matching task was investigated. One condition required a judgment based on physical identity, while in a second condition judgments were based on an odd/even dichotomy. The pattern of results demonstrated a slowing in the speed of encoding in the older subjects. This effect, while statistically significant, was slight.
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