ABSTRACT
The gift of time has been broadly distributed. Increases in longevity have affected not only “mainstream” Americans, but also those with formerly life-stunting disabilities like mental retardation and cerebral palsy, enabling a true old age for the first time in history. At the same time, these very increases in life expectancy have allowed late-onset disabilities like Alzheimer’s disease and blindness to become more common among elders after lifetimes of nondisabled adulthood. As Minkler (1990) notes, whatever the outcome of the controversy between the pandemic theory of disability (LaPlante, 1989), which correlates future increases in disability with increases in longevity, and the compression of morbidity hypothesis (Fries, 1984), which predicts decreases in disability, the reality today is that there are already more elders than ever before with either lifelong developmental disabilities or late-onset disabilities, or both. We have given some details on these numbers elsewhere (Ansello, 1988; Ansello and Eustis, 1992).
