Activities

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.

More activities

February 9, 2024

Book release: “70 is the new 50”

Ingmar Skoog’s book “70 is the new 50” discusses how aging has changed over the past 50 years. The book is based on research results from the NEAR-based H70 studies, which examine the health of different birth cohorts of 70-year-olds. The oldest cohort of 70-year-olds was born in the 20th century (1901-02 and 1906-07) and […]

November 21, 2023

Symposium at SWEAH conference in Norrköping

On November 21, NEAR attended and held a symposium at the Swedish Graduate School on Ageing and Health (SWEAH) conference in Norrköping. SWEAH is a multidisciplinary research school on aging and health, which Lund University coordinates. The theme of the conference was: “Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Sustainable Ageing” and was aimed at researchers at all levels […]

November 8, 2023

New Possibilities for Aging Research – Focus of the 2023 NEAR workshop

On November 8, NEAR organized its fifth workshop in collaboration with the Ferrero Foundation during Healthy Aging Week 2023 in Alba, Italy. This year’s workshop focused on new opportunities for aging research in Europe. NEAR presented several examples and projects using NEAR data. The workshop was chaired by Maria Eriksdotter, Dean of Karolinska Institutet (KI) […]