Aging in a 'healthy' population

A five-year project, building on an ongoing epidemiological study of menopause in 2500 women, will examine the aging process in middle-aged and older men, women, and couples in Massachusetts. While past research on aging has usually focused on disease and has drawn on a self-selecting, usually clinical population, our study will examine healthy individuals randomly selected from the general population. This approach should allow for increased inferential power of findings on how positive adjustment to the aging process occurs. The project is multi-disciplinary, combining physiological measurements (hormone levels, bone densities, etc.) with psychosocial data, and draws on previous experience with community-based methods of collecting physiological and psychological information in large health surveys.