September 23, 2020

A summary of NEAR’s 2nd Scientific workshop, 23 September, 2020

Debora Rizzuto opening the NEAR Workshop on Zoom.

NEAR’s second scientific workshop was conducted remotely over Zoom with 82 connected participants. It was chaired by Debora Rizzuto.

After a short update and welcome address by Laura Fratiglioni, Johan Skoog from the University of Gothenburg presented the NEAR sleep disturbance and cognition project, an ongoing cooperation between researchers in the H70, KP&SNAC-K, GÅS/SNAC-S, CAIDE studies and the NEAR operational group. Both insomnia in midlife and long sleep duration has been shown to be associated with higher risk for dementia, and sleep disturbances are also associated with lower MMSE scores. Multi-level models are applied but more work is needed to harmonize the differing variable measurements between the studies.

Linda Enroth from Tampere University, Finland, presented the outline of a project she is setting up, using NEAR data from nine studies. The general aim of the project is to examine the health consequences of the increasing life expectancy by analyzing disability rates and trajectories during the last years of life. It further seeks to investigate the role of sex and socioeconomic inequality behind these traits.

Enrico Ripamonti, NEAR statistician, gave a presentation on ongoing collaborative work regarding lifetime determinants of the cognitive status in older age. The work employs several waves from six databases from SOFI, NEAR and Finnish studies, including life-level analyses of younger age cohorts with outcomes at high age (>75 years).

The NEAR platform for database access and analysis will be launched during the autumn. Xiaonan Hu, NEAR data scientist, ended the workshop by demonstrating its functionality and showing examples from the SNAC-K study, which is already accessible.

The presentations rendered many follow-up questions and positive comments and will likely lead to future cooperations.