application) The proposed USC/UCLA Center on Biodemography and Population Health (BPH) will be located at the Andrus Gerontology Center of the University of Southern California (USC) and the Multicampus Program in Geriatric Medicine and Gerontology in the School of Medicine of the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA). This proposal seeks funding in order to take advantage of the unique interdisciplinary collaboration that has developed between demographers and biologists at USC and epidemiologists and clinical geriatricians at UCLA by uniting them in a Center devoted to understanding population health. The primary purpose of BPH is to provide a synergistic research environment for the integration and translation of research findings from a variety of disciplines such as epidemiology, clinical geriatrics, biostatistics, and biology into their effects on the health sums of populations and the expected life cycles of individuals. The integration of biological, epidemiologic and medical risk information is fundamental to understanding and projecting demographic trends and differences in population health. In addition, the application of the demographic perspective to medical, epidemiological, and biological knowledge is central to evaluating the relative importance of the various determinants of population health.
The specific aims of the USC/UCLA Center on BPH are: (1) to support pilot projects and on-going bio-demographic research that integrate epidemiological, medical, and biological information with the demographic perspective on population health; (2) to develop models of population health outcomes that will clarify the effects of changes in risk factors and interventions on population health; (3) to assemble a team of investigators that joins demographers with researchers from other disciplines to focus on demographic models of population health; (4) to disseminate results of Center work to, and integrate work from, a network of related researchers and policy makers. The research supported by this center will lead to a better understanding of: (1) the effects of social, behavioral, biological, and medical factors on population health outcomes; (2) the interdependence of health outcomes including chronic diseases, functioning changes, disability and morality; (3) potential changes in the rates of disease and functioning problems in the aging population in the future; (4) the causes of observed racial, socioeconomic, and gender differences in population health at the older ages.
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