Alumni Gazette
PIONEER: The MacArthur Foundation recognized Tinetti for her pioneering work to reduce falls among the elderly (Photo: MacArthur Foundation)The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation has selected pioneering geriatrics scholar Mary Tinetti ’84M (Flw) as one of 24 winners of its much-coveted MacArthur fellowships. Awarded to people of exceptional originality, accomplishment, and self-direction who are considered likely to use their awards toward significant new advances, the fellowships—also known as the MacArthur “genius” awards—come with $500,000, paid in equal installments over five years.
The Gladys Phillips Crofoot Professor of Medicine and Epidemiology and Public Health at Yale, where she directs the Yale Program on Aging, Tinetti was recognized this fall for her pathbreaking research to reduce falls among the elderly. She was the first in her field to question the widely held assumption that falls are an unavoidable aspect of aging and the first to translate those findings into clinical practice.
Falls among the elderly lead to significant pain and suffering, compounded health problems, and high medical costs. Yet at-risk patients are identifiable, according to Tinetti, and effective measures, including fall prevention exercises that can be integrated into routine care, can significantly reduce the frequency and severity of falls.
Tinetti calls the MacArthur fellowship “a wonderful opportunity that couldn’t come at a better time.” The award will help her not only to continue to develop treatment programs that integrate fall prevention, but also to pursue her most recent research interest: finding ways to manage the complex clinical decision-making process in treating patients with multiple ailments.
As a resident in internal medicine, she recalls, “I saw a lot of older patients, and we were doing a lot of things, we were giving them a lot of treatments.” But while individual conditions might have improved, “they didn’t seem to be functioning any better,” she noted.
The problem has been recognized by many health care professionals who treat older patients, but little consensus has developed within the medical community on how to address it.
Tinetti received her initial training in geriatrics at Monroe Community Hospital, where she was mentored by then director T. Franklin Williams. Williams founded Rochester’s geriatrics program, one of the first in the nation, and is now a professor emeritus of medicine at Rochester. He recalls that Tinetti’s interest in falls developed very early in her fellowship, when she was “struck by the crisis of a fall of a frail older patient under our care.” Today, the clinical guidelines Tinetti has established are “very widely used,” Williams says, and especially valuable for assessing patient risk.
William Hall, the Paul Fine Professor of Medicine at Rochester and director of the University’s Center for Healthy Aging, says that Tinetti “was brave enough to be one of the first postdoctoral fellows in the very nascent field of geriatrics here at the University in the early 1980s.” And in the decades since, he says, “Mary has been honored by her peers with virtually every honor available.”
The MacArthur fellows are selected each year by an independent committee of leaders in the arts, sciences, and humanities who evaluate hundreds of nominations from experts in a variety of fields. This year’s winners also included such diverse figures as novelist Edwidge Danticat, whose works explore the lives of Haitian immigrants; the infectious disease physician Jill Seaman, who treats patients in war-torn regions; and the documentary filmmaker James Longley, whose films have examined conflicts in the Middle East through the prism of individual communities.
