Key Summary
- The youngsters are growing unhealthy when compared to earlier years.
- The trend was described by researchers as a "generational health drift".
- It is most consistently seen for obesity and mental health.
Younger generations appear to be experiencing poorer health earlier in life than previous generations, according to a review of studies comparing national birth cohort datasets involving tens of thousands of people across the UK born since 1946.
The authors of the study have coined the term "Generational Health Drift" to describe this backward slide.
The research, which was featured on Taylor and Francis, was conducted by an expert collaborative team of academics and epidemiologists from University College London (UCL), King's College London, and the University of Oxford.
The findings show that despite major medical advances over the past 75 years, there is little to no evidence of improving physical or mental health across successive generations when compared at identical ages.
Instead, newer generations are projected to spend far more cumulative years of their lives managing chronic conditions.
The proportion of individuals with diabetes almost doubled from 3.1 per cent in the 1946 cohort to 5.9 per cent in the 1970 cohort.
Individuals born in later cohorts (1970 and 2000–02) entered overweight or obese categories at significantly younger ages and stayed in those categories longer over their life course compared to those born in 1946 and 1958.
At age 42, the prevalence of obesity was substantially higher in the 1970 cohort than it had been in the 1958 cohort at the exact same age.
When comparing adolescents across time, the 2000–02 cohort showed unprecedentedly higher symptom scores for depression and anxiety at age 14 and 17 compared to the 1958 and 1970 cohorts when they were teenagers.
Recently, healthy life expectancy (HLE) was also found to have dropped by roughly two years over the last decade, now averaging just under 61 years for both genders.
For the 1958 and 1970 cohorts, psychological distress was tracked longitudinally into midlife. The papers showed a distinct cohort increase: the 1970 cohort reported higher rates of psychological distress in their late 40s than the 1958 cohort did at the same age.
The authors conclude that the health drift is primarily driven by changing exposures to preventable social and environmental risk factors over the lifespan, including increasingly "obesogenic" modern food environments and sedentary lifestyle habits.
By 2050, a quarter of the British population will be aged 65 or over, which will increase demands on health and social care systems, and on the economy. As such, it is important that people born more recently live not only longer but also in good health to meet the challenges of population aging.
