A PUBLIC HEALTH CHALLENGE
Ageing is a natural and inevitable part of being human, which begins from the moment we are born. The key to ageing well is being able to continue to live our lives to the full and according to our values, ensuring we can work, spend time with our friends and family, and have quality social interaction and leisure time. As the population ages, there are challenges and barriers but also opportunities to stay healthy through ageing.
Due to demographic changes, we are reaching a tipping point where the healthy life years expectancy is stagnating and may be reduced. We are also facing unprecedented health inequalities where people and new generations do not share the same opportunities to live long, healthy lives.
While we age, health is becoming harder to maintain. We are seeing the emergence of multi-morbidity patterns strongly rooted in the epidemic of non-communicable diseases. Once established, these patterns are challenging to untangle. Prevalence is increasing, and the age range is broadening.
Older people are often assumed to be frail or dependent and a burden to society. Such ageist attitudes and stigmatisation can lead to discrimination and worsen inequalities, affecting the opportunities older people have to age healthily.
Ageing populations can also have a societal effect, including, for example, slower economic growth due to a shrinking workforce and increased pressure on public finances for pensions and healthcare.
The ultimate aim is to add healthier years to people’s lives.
WHAT IS AGEING AND HOW DO WE STAY HEALTHY WHILE GETTING OLDER?
Ageing is the process of becoming older, defined by time-related deterioration of the physical and mental functions needed to survive and reproduce. Beyond biological changes, ageing is often associated with other life transitions such as retirement, housing relocation and losing friends and partners (WHO Fact Sheet Ageing and Health).
A person’s capacity to age and stay healthy through ageing is rooted in multiple known and still-to-be-understood processes that begin as soon as we are conceived and continue across the life-course.
WHAT IF WE COULD DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT?
To promote healthy ageing, we need to understand and identify the barriers and resources that influence age-related diseases, enabling timely prevention and effective treatment when needed.
STAGE is a publicly funded project dedicated to advancing research and innovation to support healthy ageing by developing solutions and recommendations to help European cities better adapt to an ageing population.
We aim to identify how we can stay healthy through ageing (STAGE).
To address the call for person-centred health and care in the European regions, STAGE aims to demonstrate the importance and feasibility of a life-course approach to prevent accelerated ageing, as defined by the accumulation of multi-morbidity, and to integrate the knowledge into transferable person-centred solutions for early diagnosis and screening, treatment and long-term management of multi-morbidity.
WHAT ARE WE DOING?
STAGE IS RESEARCHING THE ROOT CAUSES OF UNHEALTHY AGEING BY:
Studying and interrogating the ethical, historical and societal barriers hindering healthy ageing through the life-course;
Mapping the geographical and architectural structure of European environments to define and develop a healthy ageing index and atlas;
Questioning the life-course and generational trajectories of multi-morbidity in cohorts and biobanks;
Investigating the molecular hallmarks of ageing and how they reflect the interaction between a person’s environment (exposome) and genetics (genome).
STAGE IS WORKING RESPONSIBLY WITH FINDABLE, ACCESSIBLE,
INTEROPERABLE AND REUSABLE (FAIR) DATA FROM HUMAN POPULATIONS TO:
Design open-source artificial intelligence (AI)-based methods for healthcare, based on guidelines for trustworthy and deployable AI in healthcare, to predict multi-morbidity trajectories;
Continue sustaining and managing access to FAIR European health and environmental data catalogues;
Demonstrate how European health and environmental data catalogues can integrate environmental and economic models to inform policymaking.
MOVING ON FROM OBSERVATIONS TO IMPLEMENTATION, STAGE IS USING ITS BUSINESS AND ACADEMIC PARTNERSHIP TO:
Build a digital platform integrating person-centred applications and tools for prevention and care which reduce the risk of multi-morbidity through ageing;
Ascertain the possibility of embedding these digital solutions into life-course informed prevention programmes and clinical practice.
STAGE IS DEVELOPING IMPACTFUL
COMMUNICATION AND
EXPLOITATION TO:
Translate the knowledge gained into recommendations for public health policies;
Engage with stakeholders, including citizens and civil society;
Promote innovative solutions for healthy ageing;
Contribute to reducing stigma related to ageism and health inequalities.
The STAGE project is divided into ten work packages. These break the project into smaller, manageable tasks and outputs and are designed to enable the project to realise its objectives
The STAGE research will lead to several key exploitable results. These are the main project outputs that can be used by others outside the project – researchers, policymakers or the public, for example – and create impact.
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