Most individuals experience a decline in health status during old age. Paradoxically, there are proposals that older adults nevertheless maintain a positive sense of well-being, an indicator of successful aging. Data from the Berlin Aging Study (BASE: Baltes & Mayer, 1999), a locally representative sample of men and women aged 70 to 100+ (N = 516, M = 85 years), suggest that cumulative health-related chronic life strains set a constraint on the potential of oldest old individuals to experience the positive side of life. The young old in BASE reported significantly higher positive SWB than did the oldest old. Chronic illness and functional

No abstract

This study documented findings on the relation between cognitive functioning (perceptual speed, memory, fluency, and knowledge) and cardiovascular and metabolic disease in a sample of very old adults (ages 70 and older), both cross-sectionally (n=516) and longitudinally (n=206) in a 4-year follow-up. After age, SES, sex, and dementia status were controlled for, 4 diagnoses were negatively associated with cognition: congestive heart failure, stroke, coronary heart disease, and diabetes mellitus, with a joint effect of 0.47 standard deviations. The impact of disease status was largest on perceptual speed and fluency, memory was impacted only by diabetes, and knowledge was not related to any somatic diagnosis. There was no differential decline in participants diagnosed with 1 of these 4 diseases and those who were not. The only cardiovascular risk factor associated with cognitive performance was alcohol consumption.

In the present paper the focus is on structural aspects of everyday competence and its relationship with various personal resources, such as health, social status, self concept and cognition. The findings support the hypothesis that two distinct, albeit intercorrelated, components of everyday competence are differentially related to the various resources examined in this paper. The two components are a basic level of competence (BaCo) which is denned mainly by self-care related activities, and an expanded level of competence (ExCo) associated mostly with leisure and social activities and advanced instrumental activities of daily living. In general, BaCo is more strongly related to health-related resources, and ExCo is more strongly associated with behavioural, psychological and social resources. 90.6 % of the reliable variance in ExCo and 82.4% in BaCo are explained by these selected resources. Furthermore, all of the age-related variance in everyday competence is accounted for by these health-related and sociobehavioural resources.Note: Correlations in italics are significant at p < 0.05.

No abstract