Supplemental Application to P01 AG008761, Project 2: The reasons why some humans live to extreme ages with no or few disabilities or diseases are largely unknown. One answer could be that the relevant mechanisms are highly complex. Another could be that there are few longitudinal data resources available to investigate what underlies successful aging among long-lived individuals. There is a clear public health need for research in this area given that exceptionally long-lived individuals are the segment of the population that is both the most rapidly expanding and the most susceptible to disease and disability (Vaupel et al 1998). ? ? This application asks for support of a research project designed to extend the follow-up of the entire Danish 1905 cohort through register sources dating back to 1968 and now available through Statistics Denmark. We surveyed the Danish 1905 cohort in 1998 and followed-up with participating survivors in 2001, 2003, and 2005, performing the first large-scale centenarian study in which both environmental and genetic information is available from a non-centenarian control group from the same birth cohort. An opportunity for studying the determinants of healthy aging in the 1905 cohort has emerged since the start of the Vaupel program project (P01 AG008761), and that is: hands-on, local access to new Statistics Denmark data. This enables us to follow the cohort from 1968 when 70% of the total birth cohort was still alive at age 62-63 regarding: demographic and social characteristics, visits to medical doctors, hospitalizations, and survival. This application has the following aims: 1: To identify all individuals born in Denmark in 1905 and living in Denmark on April 1st, 1968, and follow them with regard to mortality through 2005, with yearly follow-ups until 2008 when the cohort will be nearly extinct. Then to search the Statistics Denmark database to obtain, for each individual, information on cause-of-death, cancer occurrence, hospitalization, health insurance, and socioeconomic and marital status. Finally, to link the Statistics Denmark data to the in-person longitudinal assessments completed by our research group. 2:.To test if the leveling off in disability and morbidity prevalence at the highest ages that we have observed in our in-person surveys, will be a general health phenomenon when we study the entire 1905 cohort through the Statistics Denmark database. If so, we will be able to show that exceptional longevity does not lead to exceptional levels of disability or morbidity, a finding that will be of major public health interest. 3:.To test if the physical and cognitive functioning in the 1905 cohort at age 100 is better than the physical and cognitive functioning in the 1895-96 cohort at age 100 as predicted from studies of cohort advances among younger elderly. 4: To undertake a candidate gene analysis, including haplotype-based analyses to investigate genetic effects on exceptional longevity. ? ? ?
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