LIFELONG – Early Life Policies to Delay Biological Ageing over the Lifecourse (2023-2028, PI: Emilie Courtin)
Funder: European Research Council Starting grant (UKRI Pioneer guarantee)
Ageing is not a simple reflection of the number of years lived: individuals age at different rates. People from disadvantaged backgrounds tend to be exposed to social and environmental factors that accelerate the rate of biological ageing relative to chronological age, resulting in the premature onset of disease, disability and death. A major contributor to accelerated ageing is poverty-associated stress, which begins in the womb and extend throughout life. Ideally, social interventions would be provided early in life, before exposures accumulate. Establishing the impact of early life interventions on healthy ageing over the life course is challenging because longer-term follow-up is rarely available.
LIFELONG will seek to do just that using innovative measures of biological ageing which can capture changes in healthy ageing over timescales of years rather than decades, long before chronic diseases manifest themselves. Specifically, we will determine (1) whether an intensive early life intervention can delay biological ageing in adolescence; (2) whether education policies targeting duration, quality and access to schooling can impact the rate of biological ageing in adulthood; and (3) the effect of delaying biological ageing through early life social interventions on future mortality and morbidity trends.
The Project STAR Healthy Ageing Experiment (2023-2025, PI: Peter Muennig)
Funder: National Institute on Ageing
The purpose of the Project STAR Healthy Ageing Experiment is to obtain preliminary data to support a larger study that would recontact 11,240 participants of a successful multicenter randomized controlled trial of small class sizes called Project Student/Teacher Achievement Ratio (STAR). This future study would provide critically important information on whether changes to early childhood education can have positive impacts on healthy aging and risk factors for Alzheimer’s Disease and Alzheimer’s Disease Related Dementias (AD/ADRD). The original study, conducted between 1985-1989, produced higher rates of high school graduation, college attendance, earnings, home ownership, higher savings, and lower crime among treated participants relative to control participants. Because these are social determinants of health, we expect that it also improved participants’ health and aging and proximate risk factors for AD/ADRD. Project STAR therefore presents one potential solution to the vexing problem of declining health in the United States. Project STAR is unique not only because it experimentally tests the value of small class size on education, but also because it tests other measures of classroom quality, such as teacher experience. It therefore allows for two experiments in one.
Our short-term objectives are to examine whether Project STAR reduced premature mortality for the treatment group relative to the control group and to assess the feasibility of recontacting the original cohort. Our long-term objective is to turn Project STAR into a living cohort to study the social determinants of healthy aging by collecting laboratory and survey data, including biological age, pace of aging and proximal risk factors for AD/ADRD. The aims of the study are: (1) to collect preliminary data for a future R01; (2) to determine whether small class sizes reduce premature mortality in mid-adulthood; and (3) to release a dataset linking Project STAR experimental data to prospective mortality records using NDI.
The contribution of adult child socio-economic status to parents' risk and outcomes of Alzheimer's disease and related dementias (ADRDs) in cross-national settings (2022-2027, PI: Jacqueline Torres)
Funder: National Institute on Ageing
Globally, nearly 10 million older adults are diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias (ADRDs) each year. Given the current absence of effective pharmacological treatments, along with global disparities in dementia care, there is an urgent need to identify population-level targets of ADRDs prevention and intervention, including at the family and societal