Epidemiology and aging: how gerontology has changed noncommunicable disease epidemiology in the United States of America.
Epidemiology is a continuously evolving discipline that has been greatly enriched by addressing the health problems of the elderly. In the United States of America, this has resulted in a large national data resource of functional and health measures on older populations, heretofore not available. In this article, suggestions are made for research priorities in the next 10 years in the epidemiological study of the elderly. They include: (i) a special emphasis on enhancing analytical methods, particularly for complex longitudinal data; (ii) an effort to understand the impact of the physiochemical environment on older persons, both in the household and workplace setting; (iii) the identification of new ways to determine early life exposures among older persons, so that hypotheses about early influences on aging processes can be tested; and (iv) a general effort to include function status and other geriatric measures as a routine part of the clinical record, so that secondary research on such records can be more conveniently performed.