Anatomical and physiological changes with age: Implications for apparel design

This chapter is aimed to help to inform designers new to the active ageing market. The chapter looks at changes in the body that occur with age, with an emphasis on “natural changes” rather than clinical conditions. The difficulty with this is that one of the aspects of ageing is that the older we get, the more likely we are to see the effects of time, through wear and tear, e.g., osteoarthritis, development of cataracts, development of late-onset diabetes, etc. A lot of the literature is rightly concerned with diseases and their symptoms and how they affect the body. However, to avoid looking at old age as a medical condition, it is necessary to look at the changes that are natural and that affect all of us with time. Many of these changes are not changes of old age but age in general, and may occur earlier or later in different people depending on genetic and environmental factors. It is important that ageing is viewed as continuum in that we start to age as soon as we are conceived. Changes occur naturally as puberty leads to adulthood, and as we age so we realize, in the words of a song about old age by John Gorka, “Things aren't the way they used to be.”