Women's life expectancy is higher than men's, and this is also why women's senior years pose more problems. This, however, according to the OECD and EC report "Health at a Glance. Europe 2024" is not the only source of problems. Women are aging while being - in general - economically and financially worse off, which translates into their ability to take care of their well-being.
Senior Health Congress
Seniors' health under the magnifying glass
Published Jan. 30, 2025 09:14
Fot. Getty Images/iStockphoto
Women, the report says, already entering senior age report more chronic diseases and disabilities than men, and the problem worsens as the years pass. According to the data cited in the report, 44 percent of people aged 65 or older reported having at least two chronic diseases (data 2021-2022). Among men, the figure was 40 percent, while among women it was 46 percent. - The difference is more pronounced in Central and Eastern European countries such as Romania, Slovakia, Latvia and Croatia, the report's authors point out. Poland is not in this ranking, which does not mean that the situation is favorable. On the contrary, for we have one of the worst rates of multi-disease among seniors overall (52 percent), with the percentage of women reaching 55 percent. "Saving" us is the fact that Polish men are not too far off, as about 48 percent of seniors complain of multimorbidity.
- Older women are more likely than men to suffer from chronic conditions such as arthritis, osteoporosis, depression and dementia, the report's authors calculate. In part, this can be explained - viewed positively - by the fact that women take more systematic care of their health, so they are diagnosed with health problems earlier, but this does not change the fact that a large proportion of 65-year-old women are simply severely ill.
The report also notes that many elderly women have difficulty performing basic living tasks (dressing, hygiene) independently, so it must be assumed that they will require long-term care. At the same time, they remind us, senior women have fewer financial resources to pay for health care or long-term care. Women's pension benefits in the EU are currently 26 percent lower than men's, on average, and more than one-fifth of women over the age of 75 live below the poverty line. Also higher, for women, are the rates of unmet health needs - a result of greater health needs on the one hand and lower income on the other. Seniors in the Netherlands, Sweden and Malta are the healthiest - there, multimorbidity is a problem for at most one in three elderly people, and differences between men and women are minimal.
