Six hundred and forty two randomly selected elderly living in the various communities which make up the Capital Regional District of British Columbia were interviewed during the summer of 1984. This secondary analysis of those data focuses on the respondents' perceptions of problems they were having such as transportation, health, finances and also on their awareness of, or involvement with, a range of community services including recreation, health, social and transportation. Data revealed that the elderly were very aware of most of the services in the community but that involvement with services was related to health status, age, gender, marital status and income.

Data from the Ontario Longitudinal Study of Aging were analyzed to examine the associations of the independent variables income, income change, education, smoking and perceived health with the dependent variable mortality during a ten year follow-up beginning in 1969. The analyses investigate the associations of the independent variables with deaths, with other causes of attrition and with all causes of attrition. The results indicate that smoking is the strongest predictor of mortality, and income is the strongest socioeconomic predictor. The analyses also show that perceived health measured prior to the mortality follow-up masks the association between the independent variables and mortality. Since the exclusion of the perceived health variable did not appreciably reduce the fit of the models, it was omitted from further analyses. The distributions of mortality for the various independent variables differed appreciably between models using deaths and all causes, but the bivariate and multivariate associations between variables were relatively unaffected by the alternative methods of operationalizing the dependent variable.

Aging with grace and confidence would, for most people, be facilitated by the assurance that life would conclude with dignity. Unfortunately, such assurance is not available, especially if diminished competence does not allow the expression of a refusal to the continued administration of medical treatment. Health care professionals maintaining mentally incompetent patients on life supports should be aware of the legal risks of terminating treatment without valid informed consent. Yet who can give such consent? Does our law provide any guidance?

This paper will examine the Canadian legal realities of obtaining valid informed consent to cessation of medical treatment for the terminally or chronically ill. References will be made to The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms and the leading American jurisprudence.

It has been suggested that an exaggeration of the target age effect is obtained when the same respondents judge multiple age groups rather than only one age group. In the present study each of 1200 undergraduates rated a young, middle-aged, or old target on the 32 bipolar adjective pairs of the Aging Semantic Differential (ASD; Rosencranz & McNevin, 1969). An additional 200 undergraduates rated all three target age groups on the ASD. The ASD was scored in terms of the three dimensions reported by its authors. In the isolated judgment condition young targets were rated highest on the Instrumental-Ineffective and Personal Acceptability-Unacceptability dimensions followed, in both cases, by middle-aged and then by old targets; on the Autonomous-Dependent dimension, middle-aged targets were rated higher than both young and old targets. The hypothesized exaggeration of the target age effect in the comparative judgment condition was obtained for the descriptive dimensions (Instrumental-Ineffective and Autonomous-Dependent) but not for the evaluative dimension (Personal Acceptability-Unacceptability) of the ASD. Possible explanations for why judgment context might affect descriptive but not evaluative assessments of target age groups are discussed.

Several writers have suggested that there is an inverted U-curve of status or prestige across the lifespan in Western society. The old and the young are apparently accorded less status than persons in midlife, and women are seen as having less status than men.

In this study of 198 older individuals (mean age 67), the same inverted U-curve was found, but gender differences were very small. Much less extreme status ratings were given by this older sample than by the earlier samples of young adults. Also, status ratings were again mostly unaffected by respondents' characteristics such as age, sex, marital status, or social class. Older adults, therefore, seem to accept the broad cultural views of age stratification, but are slightly more egalitarian than the young.

Previous research on activity patterns of the elderly has relied on survey and interview methods which have depended on special measures and the long term memory of the respondents. This paper examines the use of time budgets in studying changing activity patterns across the life span. The independent variables of interest in this analysu were age, sex, marital status, education, and whether or not the individual lives alone. The dependent variable was the activity patterns of the individual. Results indicate that only age, of the factors considered here, endured significance across all comparisons.

The transport and metabolism of glucose was compared in cultured skin fibroblasts derived from normal and Alzheimer disease affected individuals. No significant differences were observed in sugar transport, CO2 production, lactate production, trichloroacetic acid soluble and precipitable material between the test groups. It is concluded that altered glucose uptake or metabolism is not a general characteristic of all Alzheimer disease cultured fibroblasts.

A survey of the major literature of the Western World from 7 B.C. to 1900 A.D. shows that the number of elderly males portrayed was about three times that of elderly females. While certain factors such as the gender of the authors or the themes of the works, may have affected this proportion, the authors of this study believe that the much larger proportion of elderly males in the literature surveyed reflects the make-up of past societies closely enough to support Santene's contention that old age was not a female world in the past and may not be a female world everywhere in the present or in the future.