This first edition of “Aging Medicine” marks the birth of a new journal in the field of Geriatrics and Gerontology. It serves as a timely reminder to focus on research opportunities in this field, shedding light on where research effort is best directed.

Clinicians often need to make adjustments when applying investigative or study results to older patients because many investigative results of older patients vary from the general population and many therapeutic studies exclude older patients for a variety of reasons. For instance, it is well known that antinuclear antibody (ANA) is a sensitive test for rheumatological conditions such as systemic lupus erythematosus. Therefore, many clinicians and laboratories would proceed with testing extractable nuclear antigen (ENA) when ANA is positive. However, in many older persons, ANA is modestly increased and may not necessarily reflect a disease process and so automatic request for ENA is unjustified. Furthermore, many older patients have multiple medical comorbidities and such patients are usually excluded from therapeutic trials. Therefore, when considering treatments, clinicians would often have to weigh up the benefits—especially if the benefit is only found in the longer term—against the side effects that treatments may bring in the shorter term. This is because many older patients’ life expectancy is limited by their medical comorbidities and may not survive to enjoy the long‐term benefits if treated. Such complex considerations may not be required in the younger population without medical comorbidities. Hence, the guidelines of treatments found in the literature are not always generalizable to our older population.