Extending the Lens of New Ageing Populations: Biomedical and Corporeal Inequities

In conceptualising New Ageing Populations (Lowton & Higgs, 2010) we drew attention to how traditional notions of, and approaches to, ‘old age’ in high-income countries were being altered by three key factors: the post 1950s advances in preventative and curative medicine; the significant transformation of social attitudes and acceptance of difference over that time; and the social contexts in which health interventions were then being delivered. We argued that collectively these factors underpinned changes to the lifecourse of populations born with serious health conditions such as cystic fibrosis, who had previously not survived to early adulthood, or to populations who had developed life-limiting conditions such as organ failure in early or mid-life, and who were now routinely living to mid-to-late adult life. These, we conceptualised as ‘pioneer cohorts’ in that they had no older cohort who could pass down to subsequent generations established ways of living into midlife.

Fifteen years later, we question what extent the concept of new ageing populations is still useful for understanding future ageing cohorts. For example, our work with now-adult recipients of liver transplant in childhood (Lowton et al, 2017) highlighted that this group were not only a pioneer cohort of those who had had organ transplants, but also that they exhibited the more contingent lives of young people interacting in reflexive societies that challenged conventional assumptions regarding ageing. Neglected from our early accounts was the lives of generations living after these pioneer cohorts and for whom new issues arose. Advances in personalised medicine and the anticipation of further life extension has created new forms of inequality in terms of access and equity regarding novel and ‘expensive’ life-extending treatments. These new sites of biomedical and corporeal inequalities represent an emerging line of fracture in the political economy of the health of new ageing populations.