Causes and Consequences of Health and Demographic Transitions: Aging Societies
Human welfare is directly associated with health and demographic transitions. Mortality decline in the late 19th and 20th centuries, itself representing a huge gain in welfare, resulted in sharp increases in population growth rates and sharply younger populations, especially in the now developing world. The rapid fertility declines that followed, first in the now developed world but from the 1960s onward increasingly in the developing world as well, sharply reduced growth rates leading to rapidly aging populations. These changes in population size, dependency ratios and relative cohort sizes have had – and continue to have – dramatic effects on population distribution, living conditions, family structures, fiscal balances, and a whole host of other factors key to human welfare, including on the determinants of population change themselves. These dynamics will continue unabated in the future with consequences that will no doubt include both the expected and the unexpected. Good policy will require good evidence of likely causal connections, good monitoring of what is actually happening, and sound methodologies. HCPDS researchers are making important contributions in these areas.
Current projects (listed in alpha order by PI):
Project Title: Unemployment insurance policies and the effects of lifecourse income, wealth, and employment status on late life health: disentangling causal effects
PI: Mauricio Avendano, PhD, David E. Bell Postdoctoral Fellow, Harvard School of Public Health
Funder: Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Health and Society Scholars Program at Harvard
Summary: This project will examine the long term health effects of variations in unemployment insurance benefits across time and between places. By using variations in lifecourse earnings, wealth, and employment status induced by these policy differences.
Project Title: MacArthur Foundation Research Network on an Aging Society
PI: Lisa Bekrman, Phd, Thomas Cabot Professor of Public Policy and Epidemiology, and Director, Harvard Center for Population and Development Studies, HSPH
Funder: MacArthur Foundation
Summary: To ascertain the potential individual, social and political institutional threats to stability created by a rapidly aging society in the United States.
Project Title:The Center for Global Demography of Aging
PI(s): David Bloom, PhD, Chair, Department of Global Health and Population, Harvard School of Public Health and David Canning, PhD, Professor of Economics and International Health, Department of Global Health and Population, Harvard School of Public Health
Funder: NIH/NIA
Summary: The Center for the Global Demography of Aging will provide support for research on demographic change and aging throughout the world, with a particular focus on developing countries. The center will support existing program of research at Harvard University as well as encourage the development of new research and will be a component of a wider University initiative on Global Health.
Project Title: India Health and Retirement Survey
PI: David Bloom, PhD, Chair, Department of Global Health and Population, Harvard School of Public Health and Lisa Berkman, PhD, Thomas Cabot Professor of Public Policy and Epidemiology, Harvard School of Public Health
Funder: NIH/NIA
Summary: The long-term goals of this research are to develop a multidisciplinary, nationally representative survey of aging, health, and retirement in India and to provide the foundation for new, rigorous, multidisciplinary studies of aging that will inform policy making and advance scientific knowledge.
Project Title: Synergistic effect of environmental exposure and psychological stress on cardiovascular outcomes in an aging population.
PI: Junenette Peters, ScD, Research Fellow, Department of Environmental Health, Harvard School of Public Health
Funder: Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Health and Society Scholars Program at Harvard
Summary: To explore the combined effects of environmental exposures and psychological measures on biomarkers of cardiovascular disease in a longitudinal study of aging. Specifically, to investigate the relation of estimates of metal exposure with inflammatory markers and telomere length; the relation of psychological stress with urinary 8-OHdG and telomere length; and the interactive relationship between black carbon and metal exposures with measures of psychological stress on oxidative stress and other biomarkers.