Healthy Ageing – Adding Years to Life and Life to Years.
Death is inevitable, but the life of protracted ill-health is not.
Introduction
The world is undergoing a huge age shift. In this day and age, most people can expect to live into their sixties and beyond. According to the data from the World Population Ageing 2017 (Highlights) and the World Population Ageing 2019 (Highlights) of the United Nations, Department of Economic and Social Affairs, the number of people aged 60 years and older will increase from 1 billion in 2019 to 1.4 billion by 2030, an increase of 34%; by 2050, the global population of older people will have more than doubled, to 2.1 billion. The number of people above age 80 years is growing even faster than the number above age 65. In 1990, there were just 54 million people aged 80 or over in the world, a number that nearly tripled to 143 million in 2019. Globally, the number of persons aged 80 or over is projected to nearly triple again to 426 million in 2050 and to increase further to 881 million in 2100. The global number of centenarians is projected to increase 10-fold between 2010 and 2050. This shift in the distribution of the population towards older age is known as population ageing.
