The committee determined that preparing the 3 reports on its own was not feasible. Hence, it decided that it would solicit proposals from potential qualified authors to draft the reports and would modify and supplement the drafts as necessary. A request for proposal was prepared and disseminated in December 2004. The authors were chosen by the committee from among the responses to the request for proposal. The manuscripts submitted by the authors were reviewed by the committee in February 2005. Among the changes made to the draft reports was the addition of recommendations for action by the AGA. The committee also established a uniform format for the 3 reports. Revised manuscripts based on the committee’s critiques were completed in March 2005. The committee also had each report evaluated by an outside expert reviewer for completeness and to ensure that the authors had not made any egregious error that may have been overlooked. This report describes how digestive function and diseases in the elderly differ from those of younger patients and the implications of those differences for gastroenterology practice. Recommendations were also made to the AGA Governing Board concerning the impact of the aging population on gastroenterology research needs training and practices. The extensive background against which these recommendations were developed are included in the report. There are more than 35 million people older than 65 years in the United States today, and their numbers are steadily increasing due to the aging of the “baby boom” cohort of individuals born between 1945 and 1970. Current predictions estimate that during the next 20 years, the percentage of people older than 65 years in the United States will increase from 13% to more than 20% of the population. The relative proportion of patients in the “oldest-old” group, aged older than 85 years, is also increasing at an even greater rate. The number of nonagenarians in the population will increase from 155,000 to more than 3 million in the next 15 years. This situation is not unique to the United States. Similar demographic shifts are being observed in Canada, Europe, and other Western or “developed” countries, in which life expectancies have increased from 65 to more than 80 years. Women will make up an increasingly larger percentage of the older population due to their increased longevity compared with men. This gender shift will be most pronounced in the oldest-old patients aged older than 85 years. The implications of this demographic shift are profound. Diagnosis and treatment of disease in patients older than 65 years currently accounts for 60% of health care expenditures, 35% of hospital discharges, and 47% of hospital days in the United States. Per capita federal spending on the elderly exceeds the amount spent on children by a ratio of 11:1.1 Who constitutes “the elderly?” In the late 1800s, Kaiser Wilhelm defined “three score and five,” or 65 years, as the age for eligibility for pension. This definition has carried over into most of Western society. Geriatricians refer to the subdivision of the over-65 age group as the “young-old” (65–75 years), the “old” (75–85 years), the “old-old” (85–95 years), and the “extreme old” (95+ years). These subdivisions may have pathophysiologic significance, because several age-associated conditions, such as neurodegenerative dementias, seem to target the old-old and extreme old groups. The older groups are also at increased risk for loss of