Objective: Average life expectancy increases day by day in the world and Turkey. Along with the increasing elderly population, people in this period need to deal with psychological and social adjustment problems as well as physical problems. In our study, we asked participants what age they thought would be the beginning of senility, and we looked at the relationship between the answer and the social, cultural and economic levels of the participants.

Material and Method: This is a survey study and conducted with 240 patients who were referred to Gaziantep University Medical Faculty Internal Medicine Polyclinic between December 2014 and March 2015. Participants were randomly selected and a questionnaire was applied after verbal approval was obtained. As a means of collecting data, a questionnaire containing question about aging sense together with the sociodemographic data of the participants was used.

Results: The average answer was 60.84±8.82 to the question “In which age would you consider yourself as

an older? from the participants. The 57.1% participants indicated the age under 65 to be old aged whereas 42.9% participants specified 65 to be over aged according to two different categories of the age limit for geriatric the age under and over 65. According to the education level of the participants, there was a significant difference in identifying the old aged of under and over 65 years old (p=0.033). The percentage of untrained or first-school graduates is 70% who indicates 65 years old as an old aged, however it is 33% according to the graduates of lyceum and universities.

Conclusion: Today, it is seen that there is a problem of developing and aging societies that have a low expectation of long life due to early aging sense when looking at this data. While societies are developing from day to day in social, economic and cultural direction, unfortunately, life quality and long life expectancy do not increase in parallel with these developments. We think that the reason for this is the intense work tempo, the stress, the work in constantly closed environments, the social environment and the life abstraction that the technology age brings.

Senility Aging sense