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By Rachael O'Connor
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Aging might be associated with decline, but a new study suggests that many people end up improving with age.
Scientists at Yale University analyzed more than a decade of data from a large and nationally representative study of older adults in the United States, and found that the elderly can and do improve over time.
However, a person's mindset towards aging plays a major part in whether a person improves.
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Researchers followed more than 11,000 participants in the Health and Retirement Study, tracking changes in cognition and physical function, and found that over a period of 12 years, 45 percent of people improved in at least one of these domains.
About 32 percent of participants improved cognitively, and 28 percent improved physically, many of them in clinically meaningful ways.
"Many people equate aging with an inevitable and continuous loss of physical and cognitive abilities," paper author and professor Becca R Levy of the Yale School of Public Health, said in a statement.
"What we found is that improvement in later life is not rare, it’s common, and it should be included in our understanding of the aging process."
Getty Images / Alessandro Biascioli
According to Levy, the noted gains "disappear when you only look at averages," from which view only a decline may be visible.
"But when you look at individual trajectories, you uncover a very different story. A meaningful percentage of the older participants that we studied got better."
"In contrast to a predominant age stereotype that later life is a time of inevitable and universal decline, we found that 45 percent of the sample of older individuals showed some improvement in cognitive and/ or physical function over the next 12 years," Levy told Newsweek.
"We also found that those older participants who had taken in more positive age beliefs from society at the start of the study were significantly more likely to show this improvement."
In the study, the team looked for potential reasons why some people improve and some do not, and hypothesized that one important factor could be whether an individual participant had more positive or negative views about aging by the time the study began.
This hypothesis was supported by the fact the study found that those with more positive age beliefs were significantly more likely to show improvements both cognitively and in their walking speed, even taking other facts such as age, sex and education into account.
The findings build on Levy's stereotype embodiment theory, which posits that stereotypes absorbed from culture eventually become biologically consequential, with previous studies suggesting negative age belief leads to higher rates of poor cognitive and physical changes.
Reacting to the results of the new study, she said: "Our findings suggest there is often a reserve capacity for improvement in later life. And because age beliefs are modifiable, this opens the door to interventions at both the individual and societal level."
These improvements were seen in both people with initial normal cognitive and physical function, as well as those who started out with impairments, and the authors hope the findings will reverse the stereotype that continuous decline is inevitable as a person gets older.
The findings could also, they hope, encourage policymakers to increase support for preventative care and other programs to promote health for older people.
Do you have a tip on a health story that Newsweek should be covering? Do you have a question about aging? Let us know via health@newsweek.com.
Update 03/09/26, 12:08 p.m. EST: This article has been updated to include comment from Becca R Levy.
Reference
Levy, B. R., & Slade, M. D. (2026). Aging Redefined: Cognitive and Physical Improvement with Positive Age Beliefs. Geriatrics, 11(2), 28. https://doi.org/10.3390/geriatrics11020028
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