Health and Environment: The Case of Elderly and the Earthquake

Abstract

Le Marche Region (IT) offers the most favourable environment for elderly. In fact, they constitute a large part of the local population, with more than four hundreds persons over 100 years old. The earthquakes, from 2016 to 2017, involved thousands of residents from the interior part of the Region, causing a variety of changes in their daily life. Data show that the elderly were strongly impacted by the situation, even though many interventions have been carried out to support them under the medical perspective. Starting from a theoretical background, in which a life-span psychology approach is adopted to look at elderly age as a potential active period of new adaptations, the paper moves to an overview of the situation, showing the role of the environment on the psycho-physical balance of elderly people.