Significance of Functional Age for Interdisciplinary and Longitudinal Research in Aging

Abstract

This paper introduces a series of papers on various areas of functional age: biochemical, auditory, anthropometric, psychological and social. These measures were developed in the V.A. Normative Aging Study to assist in the interdisciplinary analysis of aging and change in aging patterns over time. A functional age is taken as the estimated age calculated from a regression equation where the x values are predictors of chronological age.