Gerontology is the study of the
socialThe term social refers to a characteristic of living organisms...
,
psychologicalPsychology is the study of the mind and behavior. Its immediate goal is to understand individuals and groups by both establishing general principles and researching specific cases. For many, the ultimate goal of psychology is to benefit society...
and
biologicalBiology is a natural science concerned with the study of life and living organisms, including their structure, function, growth, origin, evolution, distribution, and taxonomy. Biology is a vast subject containing many subdivisions, topics, and disciplines...
aspects of
agingAgeing or aging is the accumulation of changes in a person over time. Ageing in humans refers to a multidimensional process of physical, psychological, and social change. Some dimensions of ageing grow and expand over time, while others decline...
. It is distinguished from
geriatricsGeriatrics is a sub-specialty of internal medicine and family medicine that focuses on health care of elderly people. It aims to promote health by preventing and treating diseases and disabilities in older adults. There is no set age at which patients may be under the care of a geriatrician, or...
, which is the branch of medicine that studies the diseases of the elderly.
Gerontology encompasses the following:
- studying physical, mental, and social changes in people as they age
- investigating the aging(ageing), process itself (biogerontology)
- investigating the interface of normal ageing and age-related disease (geroscience)
- investigating the effects of an ageing population
Population ageing or population aging occurs when the median age of a country or region rises. This happens because of rising life expectancy or declining birth rates. Excepting 18 countries termed 'demographic outliers' by the UN) this process is taking place in every country and region across...
on society
- applying this knowledge to policies and programs, including the macroscopic (for example government planning) and microscopic (for example running a nursing home) perspectives.
The multidisciplinary nature of gerontology means that there are a number of sub-fields, as well as associated fields such as psychology and sociology that overlap with gerontology.
The field of gerontology is relatively new, and as such often lacks structural and institutional support. Relatively few universities offer a PhD in gerontology. However, the huge increase in the elderly population in post-industrial Western nations has led to this becoming one of the most rapidly growing fields.
Biogerontology
Biogerontology is the sub-field of gerontology concerned with the
biological processesSenescence or biological aging is the change in the biology of an organism as it ages after its maturity. Such changes range from those affecting its cells and their function to those affecting the whole organism...
of aging. It involves interdisciplinary research on biological aging's causes, effects, and mechanisms. Conservative biogerontologists such as
Leonard HayflickLeonard Hayflick , Ph.D., is Professor of Anatomy at the University of California, San Francisco, School of Medicine, and was Professor of Medical Microbiology at Stanford University School of Medicine. He is a past president of the Gerontological Society of America and was a founding member of the...
have predicted that the human life expectancy will peak at about 85 (88 for females, 82 for males), although the consensus now is that the numbers will continue to rise.
Biogerontologists usually work at research universities or laboratories. The majority of biogerontologists have a PhD, sometimes a MD.
The multidisciplinary focus of gerontology and biogerontology means that there are a number of sub-fields, ... (Biogerontology Net, retrieved by Dr. Robelyn Garcia, 2010)
Biomedical gerontology, also known as experimental gerontology and
life extensionLife extension science, also known as anti-aging medicine, experimental gerontology, and biomedical gerontology, is the study of slowing down or reversing the processes of aging to extend both the maximum and average lifespan...
, is a sub-discipline of biogerontology that endeavors to slow, prevent, and even reverse aging in both humans and animals. Approaches include curing age-related diseases and slowing down the underlying processes of aging. Most "
life extensionistsThe anti-aging movement is a social movement of physicians and other health providers and patients, usually aging and wealthy, who are engaged in an assault on the effects of aging...
" believe the human life span can be increased within the next century, if not sooner. Optimists such as
Aubrey de GreyAubrey David Nicholas Jasper de Grey is an English author and theoretician in the field of gerontology, and the Chief Science Officer of the SENS Foundation. He is editor-in-chief of the academic journal Rejuvenation Research, author of The Mitochondrial Free Radical Theory of Aging and co-author...
are of the opinion that the first person to live a thousand years has already been born. Some biogerontologists take an intermediate position, emphasizing the study of the aging process as a means of mitigating
aging-associated diseasesAn aging-associated disease is a disease that is seen with increasing frequency with increasing senescence. Age-associated diseases are to be distinguished from the aging process itself because all adult animals age, but not all adult animals experience all age-associated diseases...
, while either claiming that
maximum life spanMaximum life span is a measure of the maximum amount of time one or more members of a population has been observed to survive between birth and death.Most living species have at least one upper limit on the number of times cells can divide...
can not be altered or that it is undesirable to try.
Medical gerontology
As with biogerontology, medical gerontology studies the biological causes and effects of aging. Both fields are considered by many scientists to be the most important frontiers in aging research.
Social gerontology
Social gerontology is a multi-disciplinary sub-field that specializes in studying or working with older adults.
Social gerontologists may have degrees or training in
social workSocial Work is a professional and academic discipline that seeks to improve the quality of life and wellbeing of an individual, group, or community by intervening through research, policy, community organizing, direct practice, and teaching on behalf of those afflicted with poverty or any real or...
,
nursingNursing is a healthcare profession focused on the care of individuals, families, and communities so they may attain, maintain, or recover optimal health and quality of life from conception to death....
, psychology,
sociologySociology is the study of society. It is a social science—a term with which it is sometimes synonymous—which uses various methods of empirical investigation and critical analysis to develop a body of knowledge about human social activity...
,
demographyDemography is the statistical study of human population. It can be a very general science that can be applied to any kind of dynamic human population, that is, one that changes over time or space...
, gerontology, or other social science disciplines. Social gerontologists are responsible for educating, researching, and advancing the broader causes of older people.
Because issues of life span and life extension need numbers to quantify them, there is an overlap with
demographyDemography is the statistical study of human population. It can be a very general science that can be applied to any kind of dynamic human population, that is, one that changes over time or space...
. Those who study the demography of the human life span differ from those who study the social demographics of aging.
Social work with older adults
Social work with older adults, known as geriatric social work practice, is considered to be both a macro and micro practice with individuals over the age of 60 or 65, their families and communities, aging related policy, and aging research. Geriatric social workers typically provide counseling, direct services,
care coordinationMedical case management is a collaborative process that facilitates recommended treatment plans to assure the appropriate medical care is provided to disabled, ill or injured individuals....
, community planning, and advocacy in an array of agencies and organizations including private practice,
in homeHome Care, , is health care or supportive care provided in the patient's home by healthcare professionals Home Care, (also referred to as domiciliary care or social care), is health care or supportive care provided in the patient's home by healthcare professionals Home Care, (also referred to as...
, neighborhoods, hospitals, senior congregate living, hospice/end of life care, senior centers, oncology centers and residential long term care facilities such as
nursing facilitiesA nursing home, convalescent home, skilled nursing unit , care home, rest home, or old people's home provides a type of care of residents: it is a place of residence for people who require constant nursing care and have significant deficiencies with activities of daily living...
. At the macro level, geriatric social workers work within state departments of health, adult protective services, and at universities and colleges, as well as
Administration on AgingThe Administration on Aging is an agency of the United States Department of Health and Human Services. AoA awards annual grants to State government agencies on aging and Native American tribal organizations to support programs mandated by the Congress in the Older Americans Act...
offices on a federal level in the United States.
Prevalence
Rapid aging populations are expected worldwide. In the United States, the "baby boomer" generation will begin to turn 65 in 2011. Those over the age of 85 are projected to increase from 5.3 million to 21 million by 2050. With the rapid growth of the aging population, social work education and training specialized in older adults and practitioners interested in working with older adults are increasingly in demand In the last decade, geriatric social work education, practice, and research have received substantial support from foundations such as the
John. A Hartford Foundation,
Robert Wood Johnson FoundationThe Robert Wood Johnson Foundation is the United States' largest philanthropy devoted exclusively to health and health care; it is based in Princeton, New Jersey. The foundation's mission is to improve the health and health care of all Americans...
, and
Atlantic Philanthropies The Atlantic Philanthropies is a private foundation created in 1982 by US businessman Charles F. "Chuck" Feeney. The Atlantic Philanthropies grant-making supports health and social projects in Australia, Bermuda, Northern Ireland, Republic of Ireland, South Africa, the United States and Viet Nam...
.
History of gerontology
In the
medieval Islamic worldDuring the Islamic Golden Age philosophers, scientists and engineers of the Islamic world contributed enormously to technology and culture, both by preserving earlier traditions and by adding their own inventions and innovations...
, several physicians wrote on issues related to Gerontology.
AvicennaAbū ʿAlī al-Ḥusayn ibn ʿAbd Allāh ibn Sīnā , commonly known as Ibn Sīnā or by his Latinized name Avicenna, was a Persian polymath, who wrote almost 450 treatises on a wide range of subjects, of which around 240 have survived...
's
The Canon of MedicineThe Canon of Medicine is an encyclopedia of Galenic medicine in five books compiled by Ibn Sīnā and completed in 1025. It presents a clear and organized summary of all the medical knowledge of the time...
(1025) offered instruction for the care of the aged, including
dietIn nutrition, diet is the sum of food consumed by a person or other organism. Dietary habits are the habitual decisions an individual or culture makes when choosing what foods to eat. With the word diet, it is often implied the use of specific intake of nutrition for health or weight-management...
and remedies for issues including
constipationConstipation refers to bowel movements that are infrequent or hard to pass. Constipation is a common cause of painful defecation...
. Arabic physician
Ibn Al-JazzarAhmed Ben Jaafar Ben Brahim Ibn Al Jazzar Al-Qayrawani , was an influential 10th-century Muslim physician who became famous for his writings on Islamic medicine. He was born in Qayrawan in modern-day Tunisia...
Al-Qayrawani (Algizar, c. 898-980) wrote on the medicine and health of the elderly. His scholarly work covers
sleep disorderA sleep disorder, or somnipathy, is a medical disorder of the sleep patterns of a person or animal. Some sleep disorders are serious enough to interfere with normal physical, mental and emotional functioning...
s,
forgetfulnessForgetting refers to apparent loss of information already encoded and stored in an individual's long term memory. It is a spontaneous or gradual process in which old memories are unable to be recalled from memory storage. It is subject to delicately balanced optimization that ensures that...
, how to strengthen
memoryIn psychology, memory is an organism's ability to store, retain, and recall information and experiences. Traditional studies of memory began in the fields of philosophy, including techniques of artificially enhancing memory....
and causes of
mortalityDeath is the permanent termination of the biological functions that sustain a living organism. Phenomena which commonly bring about death include old age, predation, malnutrition, disease, and accidents or trauma resulting in terminal injury....
Ishaq ibn HunaynAbū Yaʿqūb, Isḥāq ibn Ḥunayn was an influential physician and translator, known for writing the first biography of physicians in the Arabic language. He is also known for his translations of Euclid's Elements and Ptolemy's Almagest...
(died 910) also wrote on treatments for forgetfulness.
While the number of aged humans, and the maximum life span, tended to increase in every century since the 14th, society tended to consider caring for an elderly relative as a family issue. It was not until the coming of the
Industrial RevolutionThe Industrial Revolution was a period from the 18th to the 19th century where major changes in agriculture, manufacturing, mining, transportation, and technology had a profound effect on the social, economic and cultural conditions of the times...
that ideas shifted in favor of a societal care-system. Care homes for the aged emerged in the 19th century.
Some early pioneers, such as
Michel Eugène ChevreulMichel Eugène Chevreul was a French chemist whose work with fatty acids led to early applications in the fields of art and science. He is credited with the discovery of margaric acid and designing an early form of soap made from animal fats and salt...
, who himself lived to be 102, believed that aging itself should be a science to be studied. The word "gerontology" was coined circa 1903 by Elie Metchnikoff.
It was not until the 1940s, however, that pioneers like James Birren began organizing gerontology into its own field. Recognizing that there were experts in many fields all dealing with the elderly, it became apparent that a group like the Gerontological Society of America (founded in 1945) was needed. Two decades later, James Birren was appointed as the founding director of the first academic research center devoted exclusively to the study of aging, the
Ethel Percy Andrus Gerontology CenterThe Ethel Percy Andrus Gerontology Center, one of the first centers for gerontology research in the U.S., was founded at the University of Southern California in 1964. The center was expanded in 1975 with the inception of the Leonard Davis School of Gerontology, the first school of gerontology in...
at the
University of Southern CaliforniaThe University of Southern California is a private, not-for-profit, nonsectarian, research university located in Los Angeles, California, United States. USC was founded in 1880, making it California's oldest private research university...
. In 1967, the University of South Florida and the University of North Texas (formerly North Texas State University) received Older Americans Act training grants from the U.S. Administration on Aging to launch the nation's first degree programs in gerontology, at the master's level. In 1975, the University of Southern California's
Leonard Davis School of GerontologyThe Leonard Davis School of Gerontology at the University of Southern California, a leader in the field of gerontology, has pioneered educational programs including the world's first Ph.D. in Gerontology, the first joint Master's degree in Gerontology and Business Administration, and the first...
, with Birren as its founding dean, became the country's first school of gerontology within a university and, later, offered the first PhD in Gerontology degree. Since that time, a number of other universities have formed departments or schools of gerontology or aging studies. More generally, gerontological education has flourished in the United States since 1967 and degrees at all academic levels are now offered by a number of colleges and universities.
From the 1950s to the 1970s, the field was mainly social and concerned with issues such as nursing homes and health care. However, research by Leonard Hayflick in the 1960s (showing that a cell line culture will only divide about 50 times) helped lead to a separate branch, biogerontology. It became apparent that simply treating aging was not enough. Finding out about the aging process, and what could be done about it, became an issue.
Biogerontology was also bolstered when research by Cynthia Kenyon and others demonstrated that life extension was possible in lower life forms such as
fruit fliesDrosophila melanogaster is a species of Diptera, or the order of flies, in the family Drosophilidae. The species is known generally as the common fruit fly or vinegar fly. Starting from Charles W...
,
wormThe term worm refers to an obsolete taxon used by Carolus Linnaeus and Jean-Baptiste Lamarck for all non-arthropod invertebrate animals, and stems from the Old English word wyrm. Currently it is used to describe many different distantly-related animals that typically have a long cylindrical...
s, and
yeastYeasts are eukaryotic micro-organisms classified in the kingdom Fungi, with 1,500 species currently described estimated to be only 1% of all fungal species. Most reproduce asexually by mitosis, and many do so by an asymmetric division process called budding...
. So far, however, nothing more than incremental (marginal) increases in life span have been seen in any mammalian species.
Today, social gerontology remains the largest sector of the field, but the biogerontological side is seen as being the "hot" side.
See also
Academic journals on Gerontology
- Aging and memory
- Aging Portfolio
- Alliance for Aging Research
The Alliance for Aging Research is a non-profit organization based in Washington, D.C. that was founded to promote medical research to improve the human experience of aging. The Alliance also advocates and implements health education for consumers and health professionals.The Alliance is governed...
- American Aging Association
The American Aging Association is a non-profit, tax-exempt biogerontology organization of scientists and laypeople dedicated to biomedical aging studies intended to slow the aging process. The abbreviation AGE is intended to be representative of the organization, even though it is not an acronym...
- American Federation for Aging Research
The American Federation for Aging Research is a private, charitable, 501, organization whose mission is to provide funding for biomedical research on aging.- Grant programs :...
- Buck Institute for Age Research
The Buck Institute for Research on Aging is the United States' first independent biomedical research institute devoted solely to research on aging and age-related disease. The mission of the Buck Institute is to extend the healthspan, the healthy years of life....
- Elderly care
Elderly care or simply eldercare is the fulfillment of the special needs and requirements that are unique to senior citizens. This broad term encompasses such services as assisted living, adult day care, long term care, nursing homes, hospice care, and In-Home care.-Cultural and geographic...
- Gerontology Research Group
The Gerontology Research Group was started in 1990, and is a global eGroup of researchers in gerontology, some of who also meet monthly at UCLA in Los Angeles, California. The primary function of the group is to further gerontology research, with the objective of reversing or retarding aging...
- Institute for Geriatric Social Work
The Institute for Geriatric Social Work is an American not-for-profit, non-membership organization serving the fast-growing geriatric social work field...
- Life Extension
Life extension science, also known as anti-aging medicine, experimental gerontology, and biomedical gerontology, is the study of slowing down or reversing the processes of aging to extend both the maximum and average lifespan...
- List of life extension topics
- Medical Mobile
Medical Mobile is an operator of mobile telesecurity. This new industry integrates information and telecommunication technologies. It combines hands-free portable telephone, global positioning system and intelligent alert system for the benefit of the healthcare sector.Medical Mobile has...
and ColumbaSaint Columba —also known as Colum Cille , Colm Cille , Calum Cille and Kolban or Kolbjørn —was a Gaelic Irish missionary monk who propagated Christianity among the Picts during the Early Medieval Period...
- Methuselah Mouse Prize
- National Institute on Aging
The National Institute on Aging ' is a division of the U.S. National Institutes of Health , located in Baltimore, Maryland.The NIA leads a broad scientific effort to understand the nature of aging and to extend the healthy, active years of life...
- Nurses' Health Study
The Nurses Health Study, established in 1976 by Dr. Frank Speizer, and the Nurses' Health Study II, established in 1989 by Dr. Walter Willett, are the most definitive long-term epidemiological studies conducted to date on older women's health. The study has followed 121,700 female registered...
- Oldest people
This is a list of tables of the verified oldest people in the world in ordinal rank, such as oldest person or oldest man. In these tables, a supercentenarian is considered 'verified' if his or her claim has been validated by an international body that specifically deals in longevity research, such...
- Retirement
Retirement is the point where a person stops employment completely. A person may also semi-retire by reducing work hours.Many people choose to retire when they are eligible for private or public pension benefits, although some are forced to retire when physical conditions don't allow the person to...
- Silver Alert
A Silver Alert is a public notification system in the United States to broadcast information about missing persons - especially seniors with Alzheimer's Disease, dementia or other mental disabilities - in order to aid in their return....
- Telemedicine
Telemedicine is the use of telecommunication and information technologies in order to provide clinical health care at a distance. It helps eliminate distance barriers and can improve access to medical services that would often not be consistently available in distant rural communities...
- The Gerontological Society of America
The Gerontological Society of America is a multidisciplinary organization devoted to research and education in all aspects of gerontology: medical, biological, psychological and social...
- Young Foundation
The Young Foundation was launched in the spring of 2006 following the merger of the Institute of Community Studies and the Mutual Aid Centre. It is named after Michael Young, the British sociologist and social activist who created over 60 organisations including the Open University, Which? and...
External links