clear age changes in hormones output. The most obvious change is the menopause which occurs in women.

Estrogen therapy has been one of the outcomes of this kind of research. Clearly it made life more healthy and happy for a number of aging women and these kinds of outcomes hopefully will continue as the result of basic neuro endocrine kinds of research.

Finally, Finch is looking at changes in the neurotransmitters in the brain. Nerve cells communicate serus chemical substances, called neurotransmitters. There seems to be changes in the effectiveness and amount of these neuro chemical substances in the brains of mice and men. This has been linked to things like depression. Depression is a major problem of older people. There seems to be a great increase in the amount of depression. Clearly there are social causes for increased depression, but there also seem to be biochemical causes for this age change.

Additionally, memory is implicated in age changes in neurochemistry. In other kinds of studies dealing with mice that are relevant to men, recently in science, in fact the cover of Science Magazine carried a picture taken from this study. Dr. Denise Drew, who is a psychologist, has been working with a phenomenon called sensory deprivation and Congressman Beard is very active in these hearings and pointed out that nursing homes are one of his major concerns.

One of the things that we see in nursing homes is inattention to older people. They are left alone. They are not given very much care. They are not given very much stimulation.

It has been pointed out that old people, relative to the young, since they have failing vision, failing hearing, and so forth, may be in a state of relative sensory deprivation. We know that if you are an Arctic explorer, or if you are set apart socially and you don't get an adequate amount of stimulation, your brain seems to need to increase the amount of stimulation that you get, so you hallucinate or you do various things to make yourself more alert. There seems to be deleterious effects of a lack of stimulation in older people.

I think in nursing homes, this research of Dr. Drew has clear implications for the kind of treatment that older people should be given, She found, with rats, that if she ablated certain parts of the cortex, and then stimulated these animals, even old animals could recover functions. This is a rather phenomenal finding in old animals because we have a feeling that the brain of old people is not very plastic, that we couldn't intervene and change it and improve it.

But Drew's work indicates with stimulation you can improve the function even in older brains of mice and she feels that this has implications for nursing homes inasmuch as we should not let older people just sit and vegetate.

Dr. Hubert de Vries has done research in the philosophy of exercise which has clear implications and applications for old people. He has already served a number of older men in the Laguna Hills community. He devised a modified exercise program and took a number of men aged 55 through 80, some of whom even had mild cariovascular problems and trained them to increase the amount of exercise that they could put out in a given period of time.

This he found had great implications for various physiological systems. Whereas we seem to accept a lot of the changes that occur with

aging as natural and something that we have to accept as we grow old, de Vries shows that our sedentary lifestyles and diffuse phenomena and the fact we don't exercise can account for a lot of changes in our cardiovascular system and lung system and pulmonary system and so forth.

He has written "Vigor Regained" so not only will he affect the lives of the older people he directly served but hopefully his book and his modified exercise program will be looked at by older people all over the country, You can teach an old dog new tricks and improve the physiological efficiency of older individuals.

Research in our lab has been trying the same kinds of things. I worked with brain waves and we, too, are trying to intervene in the aging system, push the aging system and find out how much capacity is retained.

One of the things that occurred in the aging brain, in the electroencephlogram, EEG, is the dominant brain wave rhythm flowed and with a technique called biofeedback we have been able to train older people and younger people as well to increase the amount of activity in faster brain frequencies.

In other words, we trained them to speed up their brain waves and we found that by producing faster brain waves they have also been able to move more quickly. They have had faster reaction times. Simple reaction time is not the kind of activity that necessarily has great implications for lifestyles of the elderly, but we want to push this research further and see if we can use biofeedback to help the alertness, the attentiveness, the information processing capacity of older individuals and we are going to be continuing on this research program.

Biofeedback also has implications in terms of blood pressure. Hypertension is a great problem among older individuals. Blood pressure increases with age. There has been some successful biofeedback in teaching individuals to decrease their blood pressure and we are going to attempt this technique with older individuals.

We are also looking at a number of other brain measures. Averages, computer averages for the potential measure of brain activity to try to pin down what it is about the aging brain that changes and furthermore to develop strategy to help people to think more clearly, hopefully to feel better as well,

We take a lifespan approach. We are interested in prevention as well as in short-term intervention.

At another of our institutes one who takes a lifespan perspective is Dr. Warner Schaie. Schaie has been one of the foremost individuals in pointing out that the decline in intelligence which we assume occurs with age is completely a myth. He pointed out that when we compare old people to young people in most of our studies what we are doing is crossing generations.

In an extensive series of studies Schaie has convincingly demonstrated the impact of cultural change and generational differences on intelligence test scores. It is not that we lose intelligence with age but rather when we compare contemporary generations of old people, who have been out of school for 50-60 years and who have on the average 4 to 6 years less formal education than contemporary young generations, to young people, we find that the young score higher. When we follow people over long periods of their lifespan, we find that they do not de

cline in intellectual performance. These data have led Schaie to state that the aged are obsolete and they need to be updated by returning to school.

This is certainly relevant for this community to be concerned with. The major point is the way people score on intelligence tests has a lot to do more with their educational and environmental background than necessarily with physiological declines that might make their intelligence go down.

I think Congressman Lehman has been interested in the aging and the negative stereotypes that are put out against older individuals. I think work of individuals like Warner Schaie pointing out that intellectual decline is a myth will help us get rid of some of these negative age stereotypes that we have.

There is a great deal of other research that is relevant for all of the members here on this committee and certainly for older people. Chairman Perkins, I think, pointed out that older people in rural areas have not been given enough attention. We have demographers and we also have planners working at the center who have pointed out that in rural areas there are a large number of older people and, for the most part, older people stay where they are.

They either stay in the central cities or stay in rural areas, but it seems that the older elderly have gotten more of the attention than rural elderly and this comes under research of the demography of aging.

There are other studies done by Dr. Vernon Bengston at the center on ethnicity in the aging. Congressman Pressler has been interested in aging of Indians. What is the difference about aging in different ethnic groups or to be an older black or Chicano and so forth. What is common about aging and what is different about the experience of aging in these kinds of studies are also going on at the center.

I can speak for a great deal of time, we are also studying political scientists and legislators. What are your attitudes? How can we make you more attuned?

You here are attuned. How can we make other legislators more attuned to the problems of the aging?

This is just a sample of the research that we do at the center. I hope that you can see that it has significant direct applications to improving the quality of the lives of older individuals. I think the older individuals themselves see the relevance of this research. Older people are the ones that built the Andrus Gerontology Center from contributions of $1 up to $100,000.

The entire, or most of the money that was put into the bricks and mortar of the building came from the National Retired Teachers Association and the American Association for Retired Persons. There has not been so much money from the Federal Government. Only $7 million was proposed for research in gerontology in the Older Americans Act and $8 million that is proposed for long-term training is supposed to be rescinded by the President.

I would like to make several rather specific recommendations in regard to what hopefully will be seriously considered by this committee.

First of all I think it is very important to not only provide $7 million for research but to increase to a level of perhaps $12 million the

amount of research money approved for funding in this Older Americans Act. This is a figure derived from the Gerontological Society.

Also it seems the administration on aging for the most part is doing RFP grants, requests for proposal kinds of grants. We feel that regularly submitted research grants by academic and other institutions should be considered and funded as well under this Older Americans Act because after all there are a number of us around the country thinking about the problems of aging and I think inputs from our large and heterogeneous groups of thinkers will provide the strongest kinds of national programs in the field of aging.

Second, I feel we have to support training in the field of aging, both long-term and short-term training. The Gerontological Society proposed raising from $8 to $12 million the sum allocated for this kind of research.

Third, there is no support for multidisciplinary centers involved in the bill. Some of the Members such as Congresswoman Chisholm have supported the multidisciplinary concept and I think it should be supported with money as well as with rhetoric,

Finally, the National Institute of Aging has not received any appropriation up to this time. We have grants that are submitted that have been approved on their scientific merit, but they have no funds to support them. I realize that the National Institute of Aging does not come under the purview of this committee, but you, as Members of Congress, certainly vote on these appropriations and I hope you will all push to get the National Institute of Aging to have funds appropriated for it.

I think we have to plan for the future as well as for present generations of older Americans and for long-term research and training. This is one way we can improve the quality of life for generations of elderly today as well as generations of elderly tomorrow.

Thank you very much.

[The prepared statement follows:]

PREPARED STATEMENT OF DIANA WOODRUFF, ASSISTANT PROFESSOR, PSYCHOLOGY, ETHEL PERCY ANDRUS GERONTOLOGY CENTER, LOS ANGELES, CALIF.

GERONTOLOGICAL RESEARCH-ITS PROGRESS AND POTENTIAL

My name is Diana Woodruff. I am an Assistant Professor of Psychology and Research Associate at the Ethel Percy Andrus Gerontology Center at the University of Southern California, and I am here today to talk about research in gerontology from the perspective of a researcher and teacher. My training at the University of Southern California was supported by a NICHD traineeship in gerontology, I did postdoctoral research at UCLA on a federally funded grant, and I am currently funded by an AOA research and development grant to the Andrus Center. Thus, my training and research are products of federal government support, primarily in the field of aging, but unfortunately I am one of a small minority who have been funded in this manner.

Gerontology, the scientific study of aging, is coming of age, and one of the settings where this phenomenon is most apparent is the Andrus Gerontology Center. Under the leadership of Dr. James Birren, the Andrus Center houses programs of research, training, and community service. The Andrus Center is multidisciplinary, spanning the academic disciplines from biology to social work. Until now, the training function of the Center has been at a graduate level to provide researchers and teachers in various academic disciplines with a specialty in gerontology, but now we are also about to open our doors to undergraduate students who want to learn to provide direct services to the elderly. The Leonard Davis School of Gerontology will open in the fall of 1975 and will offer certificates and bachelor and masters degrees in Gerontology. In this man

ner we are greatly expanding that aspect of our program which involves the direct application of knowledge and services to the aged.

A rapidly expanding multidisciplinary program of research and training has been established in the ten years since the inception of the Center, bringing it national and international recognition for its work in the field of aging. An outline of ongoing research programs at the Andrus Center therefore provides a general perspective of the prospects and progress of gerontological research. Research emphasis at the Andrus Center is on improving the quality of life for the aged.

The newly constructed home of the Center was made possible through private donations totalling over $2,000,000 and ranging from $1 to $100,000 given for the most part by members of The American Association of Retired Persons and The National Retired Teachers Association. These are old people who believe in the potential of research to affect their lives and the lives of future generations of aged. Backed with this personal commitment on the part of old people and inspired by their continued interest and support of our work, we, as research gerontologists, are in rather a unique position as academics in that we are constantly in contact with those who stand to benefit from our work. We are compelled to make our research relevant, and our research reflects this perspective both for short and long range outcomes.

Projects at the Andrus Center range from training individuals to directly serving the elderly to organizing programs for older volunteers to studying basic biological processes of aging in mice. Researchers at the Center include planners, architects, social workers, public administrators, political scientists, economists, communication experts, exercise physiologists, sociologists, psychologists and biologists. While the following outline of research programs does not exhaust the activities undertaken at the Andrus Center, it does present the flavor of our work.

Beginning at a biochemical and molecular level, research in the laboratory of Dr. Caleb Finch involves, for the most part, studies of aging in the brains of mice. Since age changes in mouse brains involve brain sites affected by Parkinson's disease in humans, it is clear that there are significant implications from this research for human aging. Dr. Finch is particularly interested in aging of the neuroendocrine system and the effects of developmental changes in hormone levels. Why does the brain turn off ovarian function in females? What are the implications of changing hormone levels in old age? Such questions have resulted in applications such as estrogen therapy for postmenopausal women, and the implications of this work may affect the health and vigor of future generations of elderly. The biology research team is also investigating blood vessels in the brains of aging mice to learn if age changes in brain cells are caused by or independent of damaged and diseased arteries. In a country in which the number one cause of death is cardiovascular disease, such studies may have dramatic impact. Another line of research in Finch's laboratories involves the chemicals used by brain cells to transmit information. Neuro-transmitter substances may change with age, and this could be the key to hormone regulation. Memory changes may also be implicated by changes in these critical chemical substances in the brain. Studies of hormone production and of gene activity in brain cells are also an ongoing project of this active laboratory. In addition to providing an understanding of basic aging processes, this research may improve the quality of life in later years as well as lead to the prevention of some of the diseases (such as Parkinson's disease) of old age.

Human studies in Dr. Hubert deVries' physiology of exercise laboratory have already affected the lives of a group of older men (aged 55-80) living at Leisure World in Laguna Hills, California, and the results of this work documented in Vigor Regained, a book for lay readers, promise to affect the lives of thousands of older individuals. Dr. de Vrines speculated that much of the loss observed in physiological capacity and energy level in older people might result from an increasing sedentary life style or disuse rather than from what was assumed to be part of the normal aging process. While most exercise physiologists argued that beginning an exercise program in old age could not have beneficial effects and indeed might be dangerous, de Vries speculated that it's never too late to undertake a physical fitness program. He devised a modified exercise program for older adults and found encouraging improvements in the physical capacity and vigor of older men. Dr. de Vries' work demonstrates that aging need not be the picture of physiological decrement that we normally envision and that physical capacity can be regained to some extent through exercise even at very late