Professor Marja Jylhä tells us to stop ageism

A revolution of the very old

- Research on ageing populations cannot be done in just one discipline; we need collaboration. On the European scale, this cooperation helps us to envision how the situation is evolving and what other researchers are doing. Finland and the other Nordic countries have the advantage of excellent population data and statistics, says Professor Marja Jylhä from the University of Tampere.

European researchers on demographic change and population ageing have joined forces and increased research cooperation. 13 European countries are involved in the More Years, Better Lives project, a Joint Programming Initiative of the European Union. Director of the Gerontology Research Centre and Professor Marja Jylhä from Tampere is a member of its Scientific Advisory Board.

- There have been good projects in Europe for years but the field is fragmented. Now we hope that we can benefit from one another and engage in comparative research and data comparisons. We can think together what is important in research and focus the research done in the different countries on the truly relevant questions.

- In addition, people in Finland are still quite happy to respond to research surveys but in Central Europe the response rates can be quite low. A staggering 80 percent responded to our postal survey to people aged 90 or more.

In Finland, the Universities of Jyväskylä and Tampere are the strongest centres of multidisciplinary research on ageing. They joined forces at the beginning of 2012 by founding the Gerontology Research Centre directed by Marja Jylhä. The Centre produces information for the use of the ageing society and offers research training. The aim is to reach excellence in multidisciplinary research on ageing in Europe.

- This is nice and important cooperation. The consortium doesn’t have its own institutional walls or a financial unit – we are an activity group, says Marja Jylhä from the Gerontology Research Centre.

Marja Jylhä wants to use the research to influence how prepared the world and Finland are to welcome the biggest megatrend of our era: ageing.

- Ageing is going to change the world in a good way but also in ways that cause new problems. We in Finland should be prepared to have almost a quarter of a million people who are aged 90 or more in 2060. At present we have 35,000 such people.

- The number of 90+-year-olds doubles at short intervals. It will change the world in all imaginable ways: you cannot just say that these people need more care. A lot of things will change because people live such long lives and there will be five or six generations in families living at the same time. People have not understood this. It is quite interesting that making the human life longer, which has been the aim of social policy for several decades, can suddenly be perceived as a horror story in the public debate.

- We think of the ageing population as a big group of 65-year-olds. However, the real revolution will happen in the oldest age group.

- Older people are ignored so easily; people just think that they are retired so we don’t need to ask them anything anymore. All this is stupid in a world where a large proportion of the population is old. We should think about this seriously and stop the outdated ageism.

- There is now a structural delay between the actual age pyramid and how the society operates. Gallup, which says it’s conducting surveys that concern the whole population, doesn’t ask anything from people who are 74 or older. There are hundreds of thousands of people in that age group and they all have an opinion. There are a number of other things too that are not based on fact. These unfounded age limits should actually be analysed further.

Text: Taina Repo
Photograph: Teemu Launis
Translation: Laura Tohka