Behavior: The Old in the Country of the Young

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Almost everyone hates to think about aging. Doctors and social scientists are no exception. "They think one shouldn't look at it too closely, as though it were the head of Medusa. It is considered a morbid preoccupation," says one anthropologist. But the acute problems and swelling ranks of the American aged have lately stimulated a number of new behavioral studies that are more scientific than any ever done before. They show, among other things, that people age at very different speeds and that many changes formerly attributed to age are actually caused by other factors. The cliche that a man is as old as his arteries, for example, has been found to be misleading. It is probably more accurate to say that a man is as sick as his arteries, and that such sickness is caused by diet and stress rather than by age.

The ability of elderly people to memorize and recall new information has been exhaustively tested at the Duke University Center for the Study of Aging and Human Development. They can do it, but they need more time than younger people. Their responses are apparently slowed down by anxiety; an older person's goal is less to achieve success than to avoid failure. Changes in the blood of elderly pupils showed that they were undergoing the physiological equivalent of anxiety without being aware of it. Drugs that changed this physiological happening helped them, and their performances improved. Dr. Carl Eisdorfer, who conducted the experiments, suggests that what initially slowed down his subjects was not so much their age as their attitude toward their age.

Old people may be ridiculed when they try to act young, but according to San Francisco Psychologist Frances Carp, it is better to fight age than to accept it. In America today, "acceptance of old age holds out few if any rewards," she says. Those who surrender often become debilitated by a devastating "elderly mystique" and victims of self-fulfilling prophecies. For example, doctors at the University of Illinois studied 900 old people living at home and found many so sick that they could not walk to the door. They had lived for months without medical attention because they felt that they were old and therefore were supposed to be sick.

Actually, the overwhelming majority of the aged can fend very well for themselves. Only 5% of aged Americans live in institutions; perhaps another 5% remain bedridden at home. True, four out of five older people have a chronic condition. "But chronic diseases must be redefined," says Duke's Dr. Eisdorfer. "I've seen too many depressed people leaving their doctor's office saying, 'My God, I've got an incurable disease.' Chronic illness gets confused with fatal illness. Life itself is fatal, of course, but as far as most chronic illnesses go, we simply don't know what they do to advance death. The role of the doctor has to change. Now that infectious diseases are on their way out, the doctor must stop thinking about cures and start teaching people how to live with what they have."