Clinical Research on Aging: Strategies and Directions

Clinicians who treat the elderly are concerned with a degenerative process that affects everyone — a progressive deterioration that proceeds at different rates in different patients, that influences the presentation of acute illnesses and their response to therapy and that is associated with 100 per cent mortality.Despite its profound effects, the aging process has received little attention in medical teaching. Courses in gerontology or geriatrics are found in less than half of American medical schools, and postgraduate research and training in aging are even less common; only two residencies in this country, one for every 10 million elderly patients, . . .