Special ArticleDefinitions and Predictors of Successful Aging: A Comprehensive Review of Larger Quantitative Studies
Section snippets
Data Sources
We searched the following databases: PubMed and www.scholar.google.com using the following terms: successful aging/aging, healthy aging/aging, productive aging/aging, optimal aging/aging, aging/aging well. Next, we used the “related articles” function on the PubMed web site and examined reference lists from published articles to obtain additional papers.
Selections of Definition of Successful Aging
We restricted this search to only those articles that were published in English in peer-reviewed journals that met the following criteria: 1)
RESULTS
Our database search of English-language articles from PubMed yielded 407 articles for “successful aging,” 490 articles for “healthy aging 12 for “productive aging,” one for “aging well” or “robust aging” (We also found 51 articles for successful aging and 91 for healthy aging.). Duplicate articles from these searches were eliminated; reviews were excluded (N = 192), as were qualitative studies on successful aging (N = 9) and those that included adults younger than age 60 (N = 2). After also
DISCUSSION
We found considerable variability among the studies of successful aging in the proportion of subjects meeting operationally defined criteria, the domains that constituted definitions, how these domains were measured, and in the independent variables examined in relation to successful aging. Nonetheless, most investigations based their definitions, in part, on absence of physical disability/physical performance and, to a lesser extent, on absence of cognitive impairment. Approximately one-third
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This work was supported, in part, by the Sam and Rose Stein Institute for Research on Aging at the University of California San Diego; by the National Institute of Mental Health grants P30MH066248, R25MH019946, T32MH019934; and by the Department of Veterans Affairs.