This Article  • References  • Full text PDF  • Send to a friend  • Save in My Folder  • Save to citation manager  • Permissions  Citing Articles  • Citation map  • Citing articles on HighWire  • Contact me when this article is cited  Related Content  • Similar articles in JAMA  Social Bookmarking   What's this?

Beyond the Black Box

John C. Beck, MD; Andreas Stuck, MD

JAMA. 1996;276(21):1756-1757.

	Since this article does not have an abstract, we have provided the first 150 words of the full text PDF and any section headings.

Health and social care services required by older persons in this country will be a growing burden and a major societal concern for much of the next century.¹ The long-accepted theories of Gompertz—that mortality rates increase at predictable trajectories—have been challenged because age trajectories of mortality do not follow predictable curves.² In fact, in humans, mortality rates decelerate with age. Projections from the US Bureau of the Census have not taken this and other factors into account, however, and the US population of older persons continues to be dramatically underestimated.³ Thus, the 1990 projection of the number of older people who will be living in the United States in the year 2000 is 34.9 million,⁴ while Manton⁵ predicts 40.3 million, of whom a substantial proportion will be older than 85 years of age.

See also p 1725.

Projections of the numbers of disabled elderly in . . . [Full Text PDF of this Article]

Author Affiliations
From the Multicampus Program in Geriatric Medicine and Gerontology, University of California, Los Angeles.

Footnotes
Reprints: John C. Beck, MD, Multicampus Program in Geriatric Medicine and Gerontology, University of California, Los Angeles, 10833 Le Conte Ave, Los Angeles, CA 90024-1687.

CiteULike    Connotea    Del.icio.us    Digg    Reddit    Technorati    Twitter     What's this?