A major long-term study from Yale University's School of Public Health, published in the peer-reviewed journal Geriatrics and reported by ScienceDaily on June 21, 2026, is challenging one of the most deeply held assumptions in medicine: that aging is an inevitable process of continuous physical and cognitive decline.
The study, led by Dr. Becca R. Levy, PhD, a professor of social and behavioral sciences at the Yale School of Public Health (YSPH) and one of the world's leading experts on psychosocial determinants of aging health, analyzed more than a decade of data from the Health and Retirement Study (HRS) — a federally supported, nationally representative, long-running survey of older Americans. Tracking over 11,000 individuals aged 65 and older for up to 12 years, the researchers measured cognitive function through a global performance assessment and physical function via walking speed, a widely accepted clinical biomarker linked to disability risk, hospitalization probability, and mortality.
