Aging is a progressive deterioration of physical, psychological, functional, and social process.

1. AGING
FARHAD ZARGARI, MD, PHD

2. INTRODUCTION

3. AGING
 “We are all amateurs; we don’t live long enough to
become anything else.”
Charlie Chaplin

4. POPULATION AGING
 Population ageing — the phenomenon by which older
people become a proportionally larger share of the total
population — is inevitable when people live longer and
choose to have fewer children.

5. POPULATION AGING
 Not surprisingly, therefore, patterns of declining fertility
and mortality over the past two decades have led to
significant shifts in the age structure of the world’s
population.

6. OLD VS. YOUNG
 The world is facing a situation without precedent: We
soon will have more older people than children and
more people at extreme old age than ever before.

7. POPULATION AGING, CHALLENGES
 While rising life expectancy is a success story, population
ageing presents a number of challenges to families,
communities and societies with respect to issues such as
economic growth, economic security in old age, the
organization of health care systems and the strength of
familial support systems.

8. GOOD HEALTH VS. MORE ILLNESS
 As both the proportion of older people and the length of
life increase throughout the world, key questions arise.
Will population aging be accompanied by a longer
period of good health, a sustained sense of well-being,
and extended periods of social engagement and
productivity, or will it be associated with more illness,
disability, and dependency?

9. FISCAL PRESSURE ON SUPPORT SYSTEMS
 Old-age support ratios, defined as the number of
working-age adults per older person in the population,
are already low in most countries of the more developed
regions and are expected to continue to fall in the
coming decades, ensuring continued fiscal pressure on
support systems for older people. In settings with limited
social security systems, older people are at much greater
risk for poverty.

10. AGING
 How will aging affect health care and social costs? Are
these futures inevitable, or can we act to establish a
physical and social infrastructure that might foster better
health and wellbeing in older age? How will population
aging play out differently for low-income countries that
will age faster than their counterparts have, but before
they become industrialized and wealthy?

11. WHEN DOES AGING BEGIN?
 Aging begins the day we are born.
 No single measure of how “old” a person is.
 Aging is highly individualized.
 Aging proceeds at different rates in different people,
and within different systems of the body.