ABSTRACT
The fact that people are now living longer ensures that the elderly deserve increasing attentions, especially their health status and its determinants.
Conventional ideas on the determinants of the health status of the elderly have been challenged. For example, the supposedly inevitable connection between the loss of functional ability and age has recently been questioned. According to a WHO report (1984), the development of a morbid state and eventual subsequent invalidity can be traced to a lengthy process starting many years before the onset of old age. Thus, functional disability among the elderly is not necessarily, or solely, the consequence of chronological age (Livi & Bacci, 1982) and should be assessed on an individual basis (Manton, 1989). The infl uence of education, work, and occupation on health conditions and function is now a well-established fact.
