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The first national longitudinal study is a milestone for quality of later life.
Since the mid 1970s, we have witnessed two major sea changes in how we think about and understand aging (Cohen, 2005) both of which have had a significant impact on research in aging and the relationship between the arts and health and illness in later life.
CHANGING VIEWS ABOUT AGING
Up until the last quarter of the twentieth century, aging was largely equated with a scries of decremental changes with the passage of time. Significant decline with advancing years was seen as inevitable-our destiny. Dementing disorders were collectively senility, a term that connoted the natural course of growing old. But by 1975 a fundamental conceptual change was stirring in the way that negative changes with aging were being interpreted. New hypotheses emerged attempting to explain decrements that accompanied aging not as normal and inevitable concomitants of age, but instead as age-associated problems that were modifiable disorders.
For the scientist, the idea that a negative change is caused by a problem rather than by normal aging creates an opportunity to modify the problem. For the policy maker, such a recognition results in a new sense of responsibility to do something about the problem. Thinking about modifiable age-associated problems was a sea change that launched the modern federal infrastructure of programs for research on aging. In 1975, the National Institute on Aging appointed its first director, while the National Institute of Mental Health established a new research center on mental health and agingthe first federal research program explicitly focused on aging to be established in any country (the author of this article had the opportunity to become the new center's first chief). That same year, 1975, the Veterans Administration launched its GRECC program (for Geriatric Research, Education, and Clinical Centers). As rigorous research on aging gained speed in the fourth quarter of the twentieth century, the "problem focus" in turn led to the development of the field of geriatrics, in the 19805.
The transition from seeing negative changes with aging as being one's destiny to a new view of modifiable age-associated problems was a huge leap in itself. The culmination of the "problem" view of aging came with the concept of "successful aging"-defined...