ABSTRACT
It is only relatively recently that the aging process and its relationship to health has attracted the interest of epidemiologists. The impact of age on the health outcomes that have become so prevalent during the last half century is so strong, that it became common to simply include age in all analyses as an adjustment variable. Although this strategy permitted public health researchers to get on with many important tasks, including the development of the preventive approaches that have been so successful, it led to a pervasive lack of knowledge concerning the relationships between aging and health.
