ABSTRACT
We found declines in the prevalence of chronic disability in the U.S. elderly population in analyses of the 1982 to 1999 National Long Term Care Survey (NLTCS). An important component of the disability decline was severe cognitive impairment. We found 310,000 fewer severely cognitively impaired elderly in 1999 than 1982. Age-standardized decreases were from 1.545 million (1982) to 1.024 million (1999), a decline in prevalence from 5.7% to 2.9%. These were even larger than declines in physical disability (Mantón & Gu, 2001). They seem, in part, due to increases in the years of school completed by “new” elderly (65+) and oldest-old (85+) cohorts. Advances in biomedical technology and Medicare benefits appear also to play an important role.
