Center for Healthy Aging Behaviors & Longitudinal Investigations

University Of Chicago, Chicago IL

Investigators

Linked publications, trials & patents

Abstract

This proposal seeks to renew funding for the University of Chicago (UC) Center for Healthy Aging Behaviors and Longitudinal InvestigationS (CHABLIS). CHABLIS’ purpose remains to promote a sustained research and infrastructure development program that leverages longitudinal data from observational and interventional studies to examine how demographic and economic factors facilitate or suppress individual healthy aging behaviors to influence outcomes for older adults over the life course. Spanning five divisions and schools within UC and a growing national network of individual and institutional affiliates, CHABLIS will bring many areas of expertise and methodologies to bear on the demography and economics of aging. CHABLIS’ central hypothesis is that by connecting people across disciplines (e.g., economics, sociology, medicine), academic units, and institutions with a focus on longitudinal studies of healthy aging behaviors, we can: 1) enhance innovation in the demography and economics of aging, and 2) cultivate the next generation of leaders in social science approaches to aging research. Informed by the NIA Health Disparities Research Framework, we pursue these aims recognizing the disproportionate distribution of health within and across populations. We include multiple health disparity populations and perspectives, including several projects on the large, and often problematic, role that the health care system plays in the aging experience and how that role may vary with socioeconomic factors. Our Program Development Core continues to focus on supporting research and career development for emerging scholars and pilot projects that span the demography and economics of aging in both medical and social science realms, but now enhances support for investigators from institutions with historically low levels of NIH funding. Our External Network Core builds on UC’s tradition of integrating social science insights into the professions by integrating research in the economics and demography of aging and clinical research. We propose both to extend our current major research areas (including our Comprehensive Care Program, pharmacogenetics, and oral health clinical studies, and connections to major NIA-funded population-based studies of aging) and to develop a complementary new research area on learning health system approaches that use real world data from clinical settings. Our External Research Resources Support Core builds on our highly successful Collaborative for Innovation on Data and Measurement (CIDMA) that seeks to identify, design, conduct, and assess innovations in data collection and measurement for use in data-focused studies of aging, and to share and continually advance those findings. With the movement of CIDMA leaders Hotz from Duke to UC and Cagney from UC to the University of Michigan’s Institute for Social Research (ISR), we transition CIDMA from its original partnership with Duke to a collaboration with Cagney and colleagues from ISR. Our Administrative and Research Support Core and Communication and Dissemination Core work across the center to ensure CHABLIS operates, communicates and disseminates its work for maximum impact.