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Aging Research in Developing Nations

The seminar brought together over 50 scholars from developed and developing countries to discuss aging issues and promote integrated research agendas. Sessions focused on themes like health inequalities and life course influences on later life health. Participants presented results from studies in various world regions. Discussions revealed aging takes different paths in low-income countries, presenting new challenges like interacting chronic and infectious diseases. Attendees agreed greater harmonization of survey methods is needed, especially regarding self-reported health measures, biomarker collection, life histories, and anthropometry, while preserving cross-national comparability and understanding of unique country contexts.

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127 views2 pages

Aging Research in Developing Nations

The seminar brought together over 50 scholars from developed and developing countries to discuss aging issues and promote integrated research agendas. Sessions focused on themes like health inequalities and life course influences on later life health. Participants presented results from studies in various world regions. Discussions revealed aging takes different paths in low-income countries, presenting new challenges like interacting chronic and infectious diseases. Attendees agreed greater harmonization of survey methods is needed, especially regarding self-reported health measures, biomarker collection, life histories, and anthropometry, while preserving cross-national comparability and understanding of unique country contexts.

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cherub
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Short Seminar Report

Seminar on Aging in Developing Countries:


Building Bridges for Integrated Research Agendas.
Santiago, Chile, 23-24 April 2007

Local Host: Center for Latin American Demography (CELADE) /CEPAL.

This seminar was organized by the IUSSP Scientific Panel on Ageing in Developing Countries,
the Latin American Demography Center (CELADE), the University of Wisconsin, the Network
for Research on Aging in Latin America and the Caribbean (REALCE), and the Network of
Researchers on Aging in Develo ping Countries (University of Michigan), with financial support
of the NIA (National Ins titute on Aging), CELADE and UNFPA.

The purpose of the seminar was to bring together scholars from a variety of countries across the
globe to promote discussion on cross-cutting issues of ageing processes, compare alternative
study designs for data collection, share information and approaches to key problems, disseminate
and encourage the use of existing data sources, and foster the development of new sources
capitalizing on past research findings in the developed and developing world. Sessions were
organized around common themes, to facilitate discussions and the emergence of new, revised
integrated agendas for aging research in the developing world. The themes discussed were:
ageing in different regions of the world, health inequalities, life course influences on later life
health, health expectancy and use of health services, measures to test theories about health and
mortality, intergenerational transfers, intra-family exchanges and residential arrangements, and
study designs for cross- national comparability of studies. Approximately 50 participants from
developed and developing countries attended the meeting, including demographers, sociologists,
economists, epidemiologists, public health specialists, and anthropologists.

Participants presented results based on a variety of population-based studies conducted in Latin


America, Africa, Asia and the Middle East, Europe and North America. The discussion revealed
that aging is a process that may take different paths in low income countries and that while this
leads to complications and the need to adapt old tools to new problems it also represents an
advantage since it forces researchers to study specific problems from a different angle. For
example, the coexistence of chronic and infectious conditions, a characteristic largely absent
from the ecology of disease in high income countries, presents us with new challenges. In light
of these peculiarities, advantages and disadvantages of key survey methods and strategies that
have been used in existing studies were discussed, such as vignettes, biomarkers, life histories,
and self-reported data.

Participants agreed that harmonization of surveys was clearly needed. This was particularly true
with regard to dimensions having to do with self-reported health and conditions (and the need to
implement vignettes or similar strategies), collection of biomarkers to complement self-reports
(and the need to agree on and to standardize collection of biomarkers reducing them to a small
number that have proven to be effective markers for disease), production of life histories (with
particular emphasis on effectively and reliably eliciting early conditions), anthropometry (and the
need to targe t a few that can be easily compared across populations). Participants also agreed that
new studies need to be planned only after having learned from existing projects, their failures
and successes, and only after assessing well the contents of tools of data collection. There was
emphasis on the need to preserve comparability without jeopardizing the ability to enhance data
collection that reveals unique aspects of a country setting and their stage in the epidemiologic
and demographic transitions.

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