Scientific update
Aging and health
The Ageing Trajectories of Health: Longitudinal Opportunities and Synergies project, which includes a number of research partners in Europe and Israel, will compile a major new dataset on aging and health characteristics from over 300,000 people. These characteristics include physical and mental health, biomarkers, lifestyle habits, and social environment and participation, among other factors.
POP researchers Sergei Scherbov and Warren Sanderson will lead the IIASA contribution to the project. With the use of demographic research methods developed at IIASA, they will explore and analyze the new data sets made available by the project.
The project builds upon research conducted by Scherbov and Sanderson [1][2], showing that traditional measures of aging insufficiently capture the characteristics of aging populations—leading to ineffective policies and potential misunderstandings.
The project also complements an ongoing major ERC-funded project led by the two researchers, focused on developing new measures of age that focus on people’s characteristics, rather than the number of years they have lived.
References
[1] Sanderson WC and Scherbov S (2010). Remeasuring aging. Science 329 (5997): 1287–1288.
[2] Sanderson WC and Scherbov S (2005). Average remaining lifetimes can increase as human populations age. Nature 435 (7043): 811–813.
Collaborator
Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, Spain
Research program