by Amaia Calderon Larrañaga
The objective of this study, recently published in Age & Ageing ( https://doi.org/10.1093/ageing/afz117 ), was to explore whether different psychological factors are associated with the rate of chronic disease and disability accumulation over time, based on data from the Swedish National Study on Ageing and Care in Kungsholmen (SNAC-K, https://www.snac-k.se/).
The speed of development of multimorbidity and disability has been suggested to be a proxy of homeostatic multisystem dysregulation, and is gaining increasing attention as a potential indicator of biological aging. However, the study of longitudinal health trajectories, charted by a series of transitions, is hindered by the limited access to data on health status over multiple time points.
In this community-based longitudinal study of older adults from an urban area in Stockholm, better attitudes toward life and health, assessed through validated questionnaires on life satisfaction and general health perceptions, were associated with a lower speed of multimorbidity and disability accumulation and progression over time. This was true even of people without multimorbidity or disability at baseline, and the effects were independent of demographic, clinical, social, personality, and lifestyle factors.
These findings should encourage researchers to use measures of psychological well-being to better understand the multifactorial and diverse process of aging.
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