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Ways to Use This Report
The State of Aging and Health in America online report is designed to provide information on key indicators of older adult health to public health and aging professionals, journalists, policy makers, and others. Feedback has shown that it is useful for:
- Grant writing: This report provides context and key statistics related to older adult health at the national and state level, which can help provide the background for grant proposals.
- Program and strategic planning: State-level data can be used to identify particular areas of need and can be used to target resources to the most urgent health issues. The report’s Calls to Action and program and state examples illustrate how evidence-based approaches can be used to improve the health of older adults.
- Health news reporting: The introductory material provides a good context of the overall health issues facing older adults in the United States and highlights new public health priorities in the area of aging. Journalists working at the national, state, and local levels can use the data to highlight particular areas of need or success stories, and use the Calls to Action and programs that work to illustrate potential solutions. The state examples have rich state-specific information that can be used for an in-depth article on a particular program or activity.
- Orienting users to aging issues: This report may be used as a reference document and as a general overview of the health of older Americans, which can be very helpful when orienting new audiences to the field of aging.
The Indicators
This report includes data on 15 older adult health indicators in four areas: health status (physically unhealthy days, frequent mental distress, complete tooth loss, and disability); health behaviors (absence of leisure-time physical activity, consumption of fruits and vegetables, obesity, and smoking); preventive care and screening (influenza and pneumonia vaccination, mammograms, colorectal cancer screening, up-to-date status on selected preventive services, and cholesterol checks); and injury (hospitalizations for hip fractures). These indicators were chosen because they are each modifiable, and taken as a whole, they present a comprehensive picture of older adult health.
About the Data
This report provides the most current national- and state-level data. Although we know that local-level data is often the most useful for program planning, CDC does not have ready access to such data. Over the last few years, we’ve noted several states and communities that have developed innovative ways to ensure that key information on the health of older adults is readily available to those who need it for planning programs, setting priorities, and tracking trends at the local level. By highlighting such success stories, we hope to provide resources for other localities to create similar reports.
Fourteen of the fifteen indicators (all except hip fracture hospitalization) use data from the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS), a state-based, random telephone survey of adults age 18 and older in the United States. Some local level data is available through BRFSS, through the Selected Metropolitan/Micropolitan Area Risk Trends (SMART) project, which collects data from selected metropolitan and micropolitan statistical areas (MMSAs) with 500 or more respondents. Although the BRFSS is one of our most useful tools for assessing the health of the older adult population, it has at least three limitations. First, it excludes people who do not have telephones or who live in institutions such as nursing homes. Second, it may under-represent people who are severely impaired because they lack the functional capacity required to participate in the survey. Third, all responses to the BRFSS are self-reported and therefore have not been confirmed by a health care provider.
Data for the remaining indicator, hip fracture hospitalizations, comes from the National Hospital Discharge Survey (NHDS), which gathers information on characteristics of inpatients discharged from nonfederal short-stay hospitals in the United States. The survey is limited to hospitals with an average length of stay of fewer than 30 days for all patients, general hospitals, and children’s general hospitals. It excludes federal, military, and Department of Veterans Affairs hospitals, as well as hospital units of institutions (such as prison hospitals) and hospitals with fewer than six patient beds.
Background
The United States population is aging at an unprecedented rate. By 2030, the number of Americans who are 65 or older will more than double to 70 million people, or one in every five Americans. Because of this dramatic growth in both the number and percentage of older adults, CDC has made improving the health status and addressing the health needs of this age group one of its top agency priorities.
Because CDC is the primary federal agency for collecting and disseminating U.S. health data, national public health and aging organizations look to CDC to provide health data specific to older Americans. The data are also needed by policy makers at all levels to make informed decisions and appropriate resource allocations.
In spring 2003, CDC and the Center for the Advancement of Health, with additional support from the Merck Institute of Aging and Health (MIAH) and the MacArthur Foundation, convened the Making Health Count for Older Americans summit. This summit brought together diverse leaders in public health and aging to discuss what information on older adults is needed by policy makers, public health practitioners, journalists, and others, and in what format this information might best be shared. The feedback received during this meeting made it clear that we should follow the example set by MIAH and the Gerontological Society of America (GSA) with their 2002 State of Aging and Health in America report, with the addition of some more health indicators and state examples.
After the summit, CDC, MIAH, and GSA initiated a partnership to develop and disseminate The State of Aging and Health in America 2004 report. The 2004 edition of the report (available in hard copies and online incorporated feedback from the summit and was released at the November 2004 GSA Annual Meeting. Because it was extremely well received by its intended audience of public health and aging professionals, decision makers, and the media, CDC and MIAH (now absorbed into the larger Merck Company Foundation) agreed to publish a 2007 edition of the report.
User feedback on the 2004 edition indicated that an online, customizable format would help users to access the information more efficiently. In response, CDC has created this online version, which allows users to get targeted information on a particular state, region, or indicator of interest.
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