People are reaching later life healthier than their grandparents did. But the gains aren’t equal across the board. Associate Professor Katja Hanewald shares what 80,000 European lives reveal about who gets an active retirement.
How do you imagine your life in retirement? Travelling the world? Running after grandchildren? Maybe moving to the seaside for a quieter life?
According to research by Associate Professor Katja Hanewald, School of Risk and Actuarial Studies, UNSW Business School, we can look forward to more active years in retirement than our grandparents did.
“Many people think they only have a few good years in retirement, but in reality, we now see folks in their 70s and 80s living quite active and independent lives,” she says.
As an insurance economist and senior investigator at the Centre for Population Ageing Research (CEPAR), Associate Professor Hanewald works to understand the decisions people make around risks in retirement and how they prepare financially for longer lives.
Her latest research, conducted with John R. Beard from Columbia University and Meimei Chen and Yuanyuan Gu from Macquarie University, won the Judge’s Award at UNSW Business School’s 2026 Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) Research Showcase. The resulting paper, Cohort Trends in Intrinsic Capacity in Europe: A Population-Based Longitudinal Study, is forthcoming in The Lancet Healthy Longevity.
The research looks at the health trajectories of adults aged 50 and older. And while the findings present an overall good-news story, some gaps are getting wider.
Growing up in Germany, a nation with one of the oldest populations in the world, Associate Professor Hanewald developed an interest in longevity and its impact on individuals early on. The more she learned about the subject, the more she realised that ageing isn’t just about how long a person lives, but how many of those years are spent in good health.
“People want to know what's ahead with potentially longer retirements,” Associate Professor Hanewald says.
“Many people are facing very important questions like, ‘How good will my remaining years be? How long can I be independent? How much time do I have to travel and enjoy my savings? How much do I need to put aside for maybe aged care?’”
Associate Professor Hanewald’s recent project aims to help people answer some of these questions using the World Health Organisation’s (WHO) healthy ageing framework and a strength-based health score called intrinsic capacity for measuring health in later life.
She’s also helping refine the score, so it can be used as a screening instrument and measured through basic medical assessment tools.
“We’re now using this score to ask important questions: are more recent generations reaching older age in better health than previous generations? Is their ageing trajectory slower or the same?” she explains.
The WHO’s framework defines intrinsic capacity as a person’s mental and physical abilities, including their ability to move, think, see, hear and remember.
Using the framework, Associate Professor Hanewald and her colleagues’ research draw on the Survey of Health, Ageing, and Retirement in Europe (SHARE) and used data on 80,105 people across 10 countries, who were followed up between 2004 and 2022. Their findings are promising.
“More recently born Europeans had higher intrinsic capacity and slower decline than earlier generations,” Associate Professor Hanewald says. “This means they’re entering older age with higher levels of capacity and, on average, losing that capacity at a slower pace.”
Better access to education and advancements in nutrition, healthcare and sanitation may have helped improve our health in later years. But as the room for further advancement in these areas narrows, so too may the gains in capacity and functional ability, Associate Professor Hanewald observes.
“It looks like we may be reaching some kind of ceiling effect. The latest cohorts are seeing smaller gains, possibly because they are already starting from relatively high levels.”
As women move closer to equality in various areas, their health in later life has improved as well.
Associate Professor Hanewald’s study shows that the gap in health between men and women entering older age used to be quite significant. But that gap is now closing.
“Earlier-born women had lower intrinsic capacity than men. But the gains for more recently born women were larger than for men, progressively narrowing the difference,” she says.
It’s a starkly different story from a socioeconomic perspective. While all groups made progress overall, higher-wealth groups saw larger gains than lower-wealth groups – further widening the existing gap.
“Individuals’ initial quality of health drove the difference in their trajectory, which shows how their health at older ages is determined a lot by their life course,” she says.
It’s a finding that goes to the heart of the UN’s SDG 10 Reduced Inequalities. Longer lives are only a shared gain if the quality of those years is shared too. And Associate Professor Hanewald’s research gives policymakers the evidence of where the most critical gaps are.
Associate Professor Hanewald is working towards a universal health score that is practical and easy to use in routine care.
“It can predict the onset of limitations in daily activities and mortality,” she says. “Monitoring intrinsic capacity regularly could help track changes in health and identify declines in physical and mental capacity earlier. People could gain insights about their health and make lifestyle changes early.”
This preventive focus ties her project to SDG 3 Good Health and Well-being, where progress is measured not only in length, but in the quality of life as well.
In related recent work, Associate Professor Hanewald and colleagues created centile curves for intrinsic capacity – graphs that track changes across age – so older people in Europe can compare themselves against the population. They work like growth charts parents use to track their child’s height and weight against other children.
“We’re also working on an online platform where you’ll be able to do a basic health assessment and see how you compare to other people in Europe,” Associate Professor Hanewald says.
As a society, we have become better at living with and managing physical limitations and diseases.
Hip replacements restore mobility, while medication helps lower blood pressure or manage diabetes. Associate Professor Hanewald wants to help make sure everyone benefits equally.
Her findings present new opportunities to make further improvements in how people enter retirement.
“There are a lot of things we can still do as a society to help people maintain capacity in older age. But we can also act earlier across the life course to help younger people maintain a healthy trajectory as they get older.”
Associate Professor Hanewald’s research also poses a new question: if the health gap in later life begins well before retirement, perhaps responses to healthy ageing should too.
Whether the dream is travel, grandchildren, or a quiet life by the water, a healthier retirement is becoming a more realistic picture for many. Associate Professor Hanewald's work is about making sure that picture is reachable for everyone equally.