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If this is to be the “Decade of Healthy Ageing,” treatments and support for Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias (ADRDs) need to scale up now

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The United Nations has declared that we are now in the “UN Decade of Healthy Ageing” (2021-2030) as a way to address the challenges that accompany increasing global life expectancy. Two researchers affiliated with the Harvard Pop Center (David Bloom and Benjamin Seligman) are among the authors of this piece published on voxeu.org that cites the rapidly developed COVID-19 vaccine as proof that complex health crises can be successfully tackled.…

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Older adults in rural South Africa who care for their grandchildren may also be safeguarding their cognitive function

Two older women walk on a dirt road in rural South Africa

Three researchers (Harvard Pop Center Research Scientist Elyse Jennings, Research Associate Director Meagan Farrell, and former Bell Fellow Lindsay Kobayashi) affiliated with one of the flagship projects at the Harvard Pop Center — Health and Aging in Africa: A Longitudinal Study of an INDEPTH Community in South Africa (HAALSI) — have published their findings in the Journal of Aging and Health.

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Announcing our next cohort of Bell Fellows!

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We are pleased to announce that after an extensive and competitive recruitment process, three exceptional scholars will be joining the Harvard Pop Center community as Bell Fellows this coming fall (2021–2023). Brittney Butler’s research investigates anti-Black structural racism as a risk factor for Pregnancy Induced Hypertensive Disorders (PIHDs) among Black women. During her fellowship, she plans to build on her work by exploring neighborhood-level determinants and will incorporate new theoretical…

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Latest study on aging in South Africa presents some of the first incidence rates of aging-related cognitive impairment in this population

An older South African man and a healthcare worker do an intake sitting outside in rural South Africa

HAALSI researchers — including former Harvard Bell Fellow Lindsay Kobayashi, and Harvard Pop Center Research Associate Meagan Farrell, and Director Lisa Berkman — have published a study that finds similar patterning between social disparities (such as differences in formal education, literacy and marital status) and cognitive impairment rates in rural South Africa as observed in many high-income countries.

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Combatting mental distress by shoring up resilience during COVID-19 pandemic

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A study published in the Journal of Affective Disorders by our recent Bell Fellow Leslie Adams, PhD, and her colleagues takes a longitudinal look (with baseline and nine waves of follow-up data from March through August, 2020) at the relationship between resilience and mental distress in 6,008 participants in the Understanding America Study. “Adults living below the poverty line were less likely to report high resilience . . . participants…

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Why is the proportion of deaths from COVID-19 in nursing homes far less in Japan than in U.S.?

Head shot of Ichiro Kawachi

Ichiro Kawachi, MBChB, PhD, and his colleague Kazuhiro Abe, MD, PhD have written an op-ed in JAMA Health Forum that suggests that differences in standards of care and financing may be partially responsible for what appears to be differing infection rates between nursing homes in Japan and the U.S.