What is Standard to be Considered as Senior? | Senior Standard

You need to be fifty (an age that now includes baby boomers) to join the American Association of Retired Persons (AARP). This age is taken as the beginning of the target age to be consider as senior. For purposes of Social Security and Medicare, you qualify at sixty-two and sixty-five, respectively, but the threshold for age of eligibility for early entry into Social Security is increasing two months each calendar year. In other words, you have to be two months older next year than you do this year to enter the system.

If you’re a man over seventy, you may be entitled to use the term geezer as well as senior (as sort of an advanced degree). On the flip side (that dates me, CDs don’t have flip sides), an all-too-familiar tune plays—you could even be a “senior standard” as early as your forties, when your hard-earned raises have put you in an income bracket that makes you a target of downsizing and unemployment or underemployment. Too high an income encourages bean counters to discount the contribution of workers in their most productive years in favor of younger economy models. Does all this mean baby boomers will find guidance in the pages that follow? Yes. You’ve come a long way, baby boomer.

What can a geezer share with fellow seniors? For me, there’s been a sense of surprise. I frankly never expected to become a geezer. As a cardiologist interested in the genetics of heart disease, I did a calculation over twenty-five years ago based on my understanding of risk factors at that time and determined that my life expectancy should have been about age forty-three. Since I’d already surpassed that prediction, I decided to take vigorous steps to continue to advance my longevity even further. (It has been documented repeatedly—most recently in 2002 in the GENECARD project—that except for very rare gene mutations, even familial premature coronary disease still thrives on risk factors such as smoking, diet, and high blood pressure.) I learned much more about prevention and shifted an emphasis of my research interest away from crisis care—including heart transplantation—to preventive cardiology.

You’ve really got to be a senior to understand clearly the problems of health and life management that perplex older people. For example, it is now difficult to find a physician who can take care of most of your medical needs. Also, you will not be charged $2 for an office visit. Last week I had an appointment in an allergy clinic where I saw a doctor in training who was eventually checked by a staff doctor. The history of my allergy was taken, a stethoscope was placed on my chest, and some blood was drawn for laboratory studies. The cost: $1,168. Prudently, Medicare would not accept the exorbitant charge. They paid $142. But if these sorts of problems can perplex an “old” physician, what can the layperson expect?

Of course, the younger you are when you embrace healthful living, the better. And the more you know about yourself and your family, the better you realize if you are in line with criteria for senior. Wearing my geneticist hat, I’m going to emphasize immediately that diseases run in families. (You already knew that, didn’t you?) Hippocrates appreciated this fact almost 2,500 years ago when he wrote concerning the cause of epilepsy, “Its origin is hereditary like that of other diseases.” So here’s a recurring theme: in each section of diseases that will be discussed, familial implications must be kept in mind. And in the case of criteria for senior, this is not just so you are aware of the illnesses that afflicted your parents and siblings and other older relatives, but it’s to let your children and grandchildren know about the illnesses you’ve experienced so they can take timely steps in prevention.