Warmer temperatures are just around the corner in much of the United States — a phenomenon that long-term care residents and caregivers should be aware of, as a new report quantifies the dangers of extreme heat in older adults.
About a quarter of the global population of older adults may face extreme heat that could negatively affect their health. By 2050, as many as an additional 246 million adults over 69 (at that time) could experience temperatures over 99.5°F, researchers reported Tuesday in Nature Communications.
According to the estimate, more than 23% of the global population of these older adults — a lot of them in Africa and Asia — will encounter this intense heat. Currently, about 14% are exposed to the high temps.
“Protecting our older population will be increasingly critical in the years to come,” Andrew Chang, a cardiologist and epidemiologist from Stanford University and the University of California, San Francisco, said in ScienceNews. He wasn’t involved with the research.
“It’s this kind of perfect storm of biological aging, social loneliness and then cognition that make [heat] so much worse for older people,” Deborah Carr, a sociologist of aging at Boston University and one of the researchers, also said.
Investigators combined maps showing heat risk with where people live now, and where they will in 2050. The team counted the number of days annually when people would need to cool their environment to stay at 75°F. That’s the threshold that, when exceeded, drives up health risks in older adults.
The team found that 160 million people will live through 30 or more sweltering days each year by 2050. Left unchanged, the number could rise to 250 million, according to the authors of the report.
In Europe and North America, climate change is the factor that matters most to the growing risk for heat exposure in older adults. Shifting demographics are a big factor for heat exposure in Africa, Asia and South America; those areas have large amounts of middle-aged people who are living longer than in the past.
About 30 million people in America live with chronic heat exposure; that will grow to about 20% of the population by 2050, authors of the report found.
