Has ‘middle age’ disappeared? Or has she moved (a lot) forward?-breaking latest news

In the middle of the journey of our life, Dante said. For him, middle age was around 35, today the situation is quite different and defining when that period in which one is no longer young but not even old is a company, to the point that recently Les Mayhew, director of the International Longevity Centre of the United Kingdom, threw in the towel declaring that it makes no sense to try to associate a number with what we consider middle age: with the lengthening of the average life expectancy, thirty years are no longer so and today neither are forty. However, even if we wanted to define a halfway a fifty year oldit is still a simplification because there are people who at that age are in full swing and are perhaps inventing another career, while others are dealing with serious health problems.

Not just youth

While not wanting to generalize for a fact that in recent decades, in addition to having gained time, going from an average life expectancy of about 60 years at the beginning of the 1900s to 83 today, we often arrive in better shape at the third and fourth age: seeing is believing the photographs of a sixty-year-old from the turn of the century and one from today, it is possible that they look like father and son. So much so that a study with a provocative title recently appeared in the journal Demography Is sixty the new fifty? that pushes middle age even further. But it’s not about an exaggerated youthfulness or merit of cosmetic surgery aids, because mechanisms of biological aging they seem to have really changed in the last twenty years.

When does old age arrive?

Middle age has started to slip over thirty already for decades. The same goes for the gap between personal and biological age, between what is written on the identity card and the years that we demonstrate as well as in the general functioning of the organism, which has begun to expand over the course of the last century. The US Union Army project, which analyzed over 45,000 veterans born from the mid-1800s onwards, showed, for example, that at the dawn of the 1900s, volunteers between the ages of 20 and 40 judged unsuitable for military service because they were already dealing with hernias, cardiovascular disease or respiratory problems were many more than 50 years later. In 80 years, between the 18th and 20th centuries, life free from health problems was extended by 10 years and in the second half of the 1900s the trend became even more evident: a hundred years ago it was difficult to find a 60-year-old without ailments, today often the health starts to creak at well into 70, so much so that recently geriatricians have proposed raising the bar of the third age from 65 to 75 because, as observed by Niccol Marchionni, president of the Italian Society of Geriatric Cardiology, a 65-year-old today has the physical and cognitive fitness of a 40-45 year old 30 years ago, a 75 year old that of a 55 year old: scientifically you get older when you have an average life expectancy of 10 years and today a large part of the population between 60 and 75 years of age is in excellent shape due to the delay in the development of diseases.

The winning factors

Removing old age has had the effect of lengthening middle age, which however remains difficult to define: while other phases, such as infancy or adolescence, have relatively sharper edges, the middle period is elusive and a recent concept, which emerged with the increase in average life expectancy and the cultural changes this brought with it . Even in the 1990s alone, a large part of the population would have agreed with Dante and would have considered a 35-year-old to be middle-aged today the period between 30 and 45 years defined as stable adulthood and middle age begins later. It happens because even the mechanisms ofbiological aging have changed, especially in the last 20 years: Morgan Levine of Yale University and Eileen Crimmins of the University of Los Angeles demonstrated it in the Demography magazine, underlining that thanks to hygienic conditions less precarious for the majority of the population, a better access to foodat the less diffusion of strenuous jobs but especially the recent ones therapy, which keep cells, tissues and organs functioning properly for longer, the real age of the organism is gradually moving away from the chronological one and the middle one is increasingly encroaching on over sixty. The reduction of smokefor example, is helping many to rejuvenate: cigarettes age both the external appearance and organs and tissues because they greatly worsen circulation, and in the last two decades the number of ex-smokers has grown, especially among men.

In middle age, the foundations are laid

The recipe for prolonging middle age
removing the ailments of the relatively simple aftermath from the horizon, as underlined by Andrea Ungar, president of the Italian Society of Gerontology and Geriatrics (Sigg): Only 25% of the speed at which we age is linked to genesthe rest depends on the environment: that is diet, movement, social relationshipswith good habits that must be maintained throughout life but above all in the elusive middle age that goes more or less from 45 to 65 years, when the basis for a healthy third age.

The right rules

L’Mediterranean diet for example, it is the best in terms of variety and balance and also the one that has been shown to have a positive effect on longevity and the prevention of diseases, from cardiovascular to oncological ones; Also walk in the fresh air and at a brisk pace “rejuvenates”, as well as diagnose and treat gradually any diseases to maintain the functionality of tissues and organs for as long as possible.

Necessary medical checkups

Middle age is therefore also the time to undergo some checkups, without performing batteries of indiscriminate tests every year but making sure to know, from the age of 40 onwards, one’s own levels of cholesterol, blood sugar, blood pressure and heart rate and re-checking them with a frequency indicated by the family doctor, more or less frequent according to the risk profile. A regular visit also serves to monitor the results of tests such as the occult blood in the faeces, dedicated to the over 50s for colorectal cancer screening, or the mammographyperformed in women over 45 for breast cancer screening.

The family

Finally, healthy relationships are needed to prolong a healthy midlife, as Ungar adds: Social relationships literally lengthen life and keep us young, making us feel useful and connected to others and lowering the psychological age, the years we feel . Among the relationships that matter most in designing a long-lived and healthy life trajectory is the one with the partnerprecisely during the middle age: a US study for which over 2,000 centenarians were analyzed showed that to live long and well it is important to share a healthy family environment, made up of good habits and mutual support, especially from the doors on.