Why has aging become an urgent public health issue?

Older people constitute a larger segment of the population than at any other time in history. In 2010, there were over 500 million people older than 65. By 2050, that number will reach 1.5 billion, or about 16 percent of the world’s population. In the past, infectious and parasitic diseases were the biggest threat to human health. The goal of medicine was to cure these diseases. Today’s unprecedented life spans, which have doubled since 1900, are a measure of how successful we’ve been. Now the leading causes of death are late-onset conditions such as cardiovascular disease, cancer, type 2 diabetes, arthritis, and stroke. Given the growing population of older people around the world, we don’t have enough resources to try to cure these diseases in everyone who develops them.The paradigm has to shift to prevention, which is what public health does best.

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