Health
Young/prime adulthood can be considered the healthiest time of life and young adults are generally in good health, subject neither to disease nor the problems of senescence. Biological function and physical performance reach their peak from 20–35 years of age, waning after 35. Strength peaks around 25 years of age, plateaus through 35 - 40 years of age, and then declines. Flexibility also decreases with age throughout adulthood. However, there are large individual differences and a fit 40-year-old may out-compete a sedentary 20-year-old.
Women reach their peak fertility in their early 20's. Assuming unprotected intercourse with a man of the same age, women aged 19–26 have about a 50% chance of becoming pregnant during a given menstrual cycle, compared with 40% in the 27-34 age group and below 30% for women 35-39.
In developed countries, mortality rates for the 18-40 age group are typically very low. Men are more likely to die at this age than women, particularly in the 18-25 group: reasons include car accidents, and suicide. Mortality statistics among men and women level off during the late twenties and thirties, due in part to good health and less risk-taking behavior.
Regarding disease, cancer is much less common in young than in older adults. Exceptions are testicular cancer, cervical cancer, and Hodgkin's lymphoma. In sub-Saharan Africa, HIV/AIDS has hit the early adult population particularly hard. According to a United Nations report, AIDS has significantly increased mortality of between ages 20 to 55 for African males and 20 to 45 for African females, reducing the life expectancy in South Africa by 18 years and in Botswana by 34 years.
Read more about this topic: Young Adult (psychology)
Famous quotes containing the word health:
“Woman ... cannot be content with health and agility: she must make exorbitant efforts to appear something that never could exist without a diligent perversion of nature. Is it too much to ask that women be spared the daily struggle for superhuman beauty in order to offer it to the caresses of a subhumanly ugly mate?”
—Germaine Greer (b. 1939)
“The filth and noise of the crowded streets soon destroy the elasticity of health which belongs to the country boy.”
—Rutherford Birchard Hayes (1822–1893)
“I would hope that parents and grown children could be friends. When a friend confides in you that she’s going to do something that you think is most inappropriate, foolhardy or even dangerous, wouldn’t you as a friend say so—in a calm, supportive way? Yet I have to be so careful what I say to my children. I have to walk on eggs to be sure I’m not hurting their feelings or interfering with their lives.”
—Anonymous Parent of Adult Children. Ourselves and Our Children, by Boston Women’s Health Book Collective, ch. 5 (1978)