These successes have the potential to benefit all generations and all women. As baby-boomers reach retirement age and medical breakthroughs as well as more healthy lifestyles continue to contribute to increasing life expectancy, the numbers of older Americans, in particular women, are projected to increase through the early part of the next century. Census bureau statistics show that just in the last five years, the numbers of those aged 65 and older have increased approximately 7 percent and now number 34 million and comprise about 13 percent of the general population. Projections for the middle of the next century place those over age 65 at around 20 percent of the population. While these costs are staggering, they are more easily quantifiable and perhaps less painful to consider than are the human costs of disease and disability in older age.
Women make up a majority of the older population.
In 1994, elderly women in the United States outnumbered elderly men 3 to 2 and numbered nearly 20 million. The death of a husband often marks the point of acute economic reversals for the surviving wife. The NIA supports a diverse portfolio of research on older women s health addressing health and wellness, basic biology of aging, neuroscience and neuropsychology of aging, diseases and conditions of older adults, and behavioral and social problems of older women. NIA research includes several long-term research projects that are in progress. The projects focus on physical disability, decline in function of older women, hormone therapy and menopause, hip fractures, osteoporosis and age-related muscle loss, memory, dementia and Alzheimer s Disease, caregiver burden, and cancer in older aged women.