Stop Treating 70- and 90-Year-Olds the Same.

[elleng]

*There are 17 subgroupings for children from birth through age 18. That makes sense because, of course, a 6-month-old has had little time to develop immunity, weighs far less than an 8-year-old and is exposed to fewer people than a teenager. There are five subgroups for adults. But all Americans 65 and older — including the two fastest-growing segments of our population, the 80- to 90-year-olds and those over 100 — are lumped in a single group, as if bodies and behaviors don’t change over the last half-century of life.

You don’t need to be a doctor to see that this is absurd. Just as we don’t confuse toddlers with teenagers, or young adults with their middle-age parents, so, too, are we able to distinguish 70-year-olds from the nonagenarians a generation ahead of them.

Those two groups — the “young old” and the “old old” — don’t just differ in how they look and spend their days; they also differ biologically. As a result, it’s likely that we are incorrectly vaccinating a significant number of the 47 million Americans over 65.

With advancing age, the immune system weakens (a phenomenon called immunosenescence) and chronic diseases compromise the body’s resistance to infectious organisms. Older adults are thus more susceptible to infections — more likely to get sick, more likely to require hospitalization and more likely to die.'>>>

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/11/opinion/sunday/vaccinations-elderly.html?