My mother fell down and now her knee is hurting her.” (The patient has her son there to translate for her; others can call on Yale-New Haven Hospital Interpreter Services.) Listening closely is Mary Tinetti, M.D., director of the Yale Program on Aging, a pathbreaking eVort to understand and improve the lives of older persons. Drawing on both clinical and basic science faculty, and committed to treating the whole person, the program is largely responsible for replacing the prevailing opinion that such problems as falls and delirium are an inevitable condition of growing older with the knowledge that they can be modified or prevented.

Since the 1970s, Yale researchers have been studying the process of aging, ranging from the predictors of stroke to the effects of bereavement on the health of older persons. In the 1980s, the Department of Internal Medicine developed active inpatient and outpatient programs for the care of older patients, and the Department of Epidemiology and Public Health was awarded one of three contracts from the National Institute on Aging to conduct a large, longitudinal, community-based study addressing the physical, psychological, social, and cognitive functioning of older persons. This study, along with a major offshoot, the MacArthur Research Program in Successful Aging, established Yale University School of Medicine as a leading institution in studies of human aging.

In the late 1980s, the school began developing a strong clinical research program, built on the foundations of both traditional and clinical epidemiology, that addresses the common yet largely neglected health problems of older persons, including falls and injury, delirium, elder abuse, and functional decline.

In 1991, Yale moved to support and expand this powerful collaboration among the departments of Epidemiology and Public Health, Internal Medicine, and Psychiatry by creating the interdepartmental, multidisciplinary Program on Aging. In 1992, the Program on Aging, under Tinetti’s direction, competed successfully to become one of the first NIA-funded Pepper Research Centers on Aging in the country.

Fourth-year medical students who choose a clinical elective with Tinetti learn from a leader in the field of gerontology to see elderly people as individuals, often in real-world settings; not to accept all physical decline as inevitable; and to aspire to improve the quality of life for even the oldest patients.

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For three decades, Yale has been in the forefront of research and treatment for elderly people. Mary Tinetti, second from the left, helped the program earn its designation as a Claude Pepper Research Center on Aging.

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