This is an ongoing collaborative effort involving several national and international laboratories to coordinate the collection, evaluation and interpretation of data on normal genetic markers in order to assess the cross-cultural patterns of genetic and extraneous factors as they relate to normative aging and to diseases of late onset, including osteoporosis, osteoarthritis, Alzheimer's disease, breast cancer, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis and parkinsonism dementia. The specific objectives of the study are: 1) To better understand the contributions of genetic and non-genetic factors contributing to the process of normative aging, and 2) To study the cross-cultural variability in the occurrence of dermatoglyphics, lateral dominance, iris structure and other genetic markers in the BLSA participants and other control samples and compare them with those of patients with diseases with late onset.
