Michigan Center on the Demography of Aging (MiCDA)

This study aims to examine the role of friends in the daily experiences of African American (AA) and European American (EA) ADRD caregivers. This pilot study uses data from the Stress and Well-Being in the Everyday Lives of Caregivers study (SWELCare), a study of AA and EA men and women who are primary caregivers and co-reside with their family member or friend who is living with ADRD.2

The goal of this pilot project is to determine if pre-pandemic features of immune aging (i.e., age associated T-cell subsets, inflammation, and epigenetic age) are associated with COVID-19 infection and disease severity.  The pilot draws upon data from the Health and Retirement Study, a nationally representative longitudinal study of adults over 55 years.

This project uses restricted access state-level vital statistics data from the National Center for Health Statistics as well as national-level data for 18 high-income peer countries in the Human Mortality Database to help point to similarities in key structural advantages and social policies shared by specific states and peer countries that allowed for the COVID-19 pandemic to be managed more effectively and mitigated avoidable deaths at all ages.

This project assesses the early impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on population-level trends in mobility and ADL limitations and their risk factors among older adults in the United States. Analyses draw upon four nationally representative data sources: the Health and Retirement Study, the National Health Interview Survey, the National Health and Aging Trends Study and the Understanding America Study.

Paid family leave laws have the potential to alter older adults’ allocation of time spent in work and caregiving, which can in turn affect their own physical, emotional, and financial wellbeing. In 2004, California became the first state to require that employers provide paid family leave to their employees.  Using data from the Health and Retirement Study, this pilot project examines changes in older adults’ time spent in work and caregiving before and after California’s 2004 paid family leave law.

This pilot study will test the central hypothesis that vision impairments is a “second hit” that potentiates the risk of cognitive decline and dementia among those that carry the APOE ε4 allele. This hypothesis will be tested using data from the nationally-representative Health and Retirement Study and its sub-study, the Aging, Demographics and Memory Study.

Documenting changes related to the pandemic in long-term services and supports and family care is crucial in understanding the immediate impact of COVID-19 on vulnerable older adults and for establishing a nationally representative baseline to study longer-run effects.  This pilot project will use data from the Health and Retirement Study to examine the effect of the COVID-19 on long-term services and supports and care decisions among older adults who need help with at least two activities of daily living (ADLs) or with probable dementia (high need older adults).

This pilot study will develop advanced deep learning neural networks to analyze Clock-Drawing Test images to predict dementia diagnosis. The pilot will draw upon Medicare claims linked with a large, publicly available repository of clock images from the 2011-2019 National Health and Aging Trends Study, a panel study of Medicare beneficiaries ages 65 and older.

Adult children often take on central roles in caring for aging parents-especially when a parent develops dementia. How families allocate care among adult children, how this allocation changes over the course of dementia, and implications for the course of the disease remain largely unexplored. Using nearly 20 years of data from the Health and Retirement Study, the proposed pilot project will explore new measures of care allocation among adult children in families in which a parent has dementia.

Epigenetics—the study of gene modifications that do not involve changes to the nucleotide sequence—holds great promise as a potential indicator of molecular change from contextual effects and aging and consequently an early signal of health disparities. Over the last few years aging studies have assayed thousands of genetic samples at great expense. However, despite evidence suggesting sensitivity of epigenetics assays to external stimuli, no research has explored the effects of collection and storage conditions on epigenetic data. This pilot project extends prior work on DNA quality and genomic assay stability to include DNA methylation—the most widely used (and most stable) measure of epigenetics in aging studies.

By 2050, nearly 70% of global dementia cases are projected to occur in lower- and middle-income countries (LMICs). There is an urgent need to build up scientific evidence and resources to understand the etiology of cognitive aging outcomes in LMICs. A first step is to understand the measurement properties of various cognitive tests administered in these countries. This pilot project will use new data from five internationally harmonized longitudinal studies of aging using the Harmonized Cognitive Assessment Protocol (HCAP), including three LMICs and two high-income countries. Psychometric methods will be used to equate cognitive test item scores across countries so that cross-national comparisons may proceed.

Augmenting surveys with information about the places sample members have lived can enhance the value of survey data. Restricted enclaves with remote access are valuable for sharing such data, yet barriers to use outside such environments remain because of confidentiality and privacy concerns. The Census Bureau has recently taken steps to create synthetic versions of some of its data products, but the robustness of such data to answer questions not explicitly considered by the synthetic data generation technique has been questioned. Using the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, this pilot project will develop and evaluate procedures to create survey data linked with synthetic geographic data designed to address confidential and privacy as well as analytic concerns.

This research project will examine age-related differences in data quality, participation, respondent experience, and costs in two types of interviews: video-mediated (live two-way communication via platforms like Skype) and video self-administered (video-recorded interviewers asking questions and respondents answering by typing or clicking). These two survey modes are promising because they use off-the-shelf video technology and are less costly than face to face interviews, but they are not yet widely deployed. The project will provide new insights regarding how video-based interviewing affects respondent behavior and experience in surveys, in particular, for older populations.

Housing characteristics and disability in later life are closely tied, but whether housing can positively influence functioning through social resources is unclear. Using data from the National Health and Aging Trends Study (NHATS), this pilot study will determine if and which social resources are a pathway through which housing is related to functional health in later life.

Social engagement is an important protective factor for age-related cognitive decline and dementia. However, it is unclear whether social engagement through social technologies (i.e., texting, social media, video chat, email) demonstrate the same protective effects as face-to-face social interactions. The proposed study will assess whether previously-established social technology measures demonstrate measurement equivalence across younger and older adult populations and are psychometrically sound for use in older adults.

Blindness and vision impairment affects 1 in 11 adults over age 65 in the United States. Among older adults, vision impairment is associated with loss of independence, decreased quality of life and increased morbidity and mortality. In this study, we explore the pathways through which vision impairment influences poorer subjective wellbeing and whether this association is mediated through participation or activity limitations.

The incidence of mild cognitive impairment (MCI) and Alzheimer’s Disease and Related Dementias (ADRD) is higher among many racial/ ethnic minorities, but rates among Arab Americans, who exhibit more cardiovascular and other risk factors than whites, are unknown.  The first of its kind, this pilot study translates and validates established measures of cognition, function and behavior commonly used in MCI and ADRD diagnosis so they may be used with aging Arab Americans.

This project undertakes the first systematic analysis of the 2014 Native Hawaiian Pacific Islander-National Health Interview Survey (NHPI-NHIS) to understand the burden of disease and disability among the aging NHPI population. This project will provide important baseline information on the aged NHPI population and inform future directions for research, intervention, and policy.

This pilot study examines the relationship between housing characteristics and health among older Americans. Using the Health and Retirement Study, we hypothesize that, homeownership will have a protective effect over negative health outcomes in disinvested neighborhoods and that affordable housing and good housing conditions protect against negative health outcomes.

Using data from ten waves (1996 to 2014) of the Health and Retirement Studies, this study examines patterns of multi-morbidity both within and between spouses, focusing on concordance in the management activities required by multiple conditions.

Significant knowledge gaps regarding the depression-dementia link include modifiable factors that attenuate this link and reasons for differences in resilience across racial groups. This pilot addresses these gaps by recruiting a racially diverse, population-representative sample of older adults for psychosocial, cognitive, and functional assessment and by examining how modifiable psychosocial resources that differ across race promote cognitive resilience to depressive symptoms.

This pilot study uses patient-reported outcomes in the nationally-representative Health and Retirement Study and Medicare claims to develop and internally validate a multimorbidity index for International Classification of Diseases (ICD)-coded chronic conditions weighted to physical functioning. The study will yield a validated multimorbidity measure that captures the impact of coexisting chronic diseases on physical functioning in aging adults relevant for clinical care, research, and policy.

This research evaluates the nature of interactions between two key socio-demographic variables (educational attainment, race/ethnicity) and two key behavioral risk factors (obesity and smoking) to determine whether the two sets of risk factors operate additively or multiplicatively with each to influence the chance of dying.

This pilot undertakes a mixed-methods study of older adults with dementia in rural Michigan. The pilot addresses how rural older adults with dementia are cared for in their communities, as viewed by primary care physicians in those communities.

Using the HRS representative sample of approximately 20,000 Americans over the age of 50, this pilot examines how limits in cholinergic function are related to changes in measurements of attention, memory, and cognitive status and physiological health across multiple time points.

This pilot examines the extent to which polygenic scores (PGSs) are associated with cardiovascular risk factors (i.e. systolic and diastolic blood pressure, body mass index, smoking, and alcohol use) and how these associations are modified by key demographic (i.e. sex, age) and socioeconomic factors across the life course.

This pilot project charts new territory in investigating the long-term health consequences of dynapenia to: 1) predict whether individuals who fall below these proposed cut-points are at risk for developing future negative health outcomes; 2) examine proposed cut-points in predicting future health risks above and beyond traditional indicators of morbidity and mortality; and 3) understand the role obesity may play in exacerbating future negative health outcomes among those who are considered weak.

Telomeres serve an important role in the protection of chromosomal DNA and the regulation of cellular senescence. The goal of this project is to examine the stability of salivary telomere length when stored at room temperature for periods of up to 1 year.

This pilot demonstrates the feasibility of creating large-scale linked vital records to study changes in health and longevity over the 20th century. The pilot lays the groundwork for a multi-state resource called The Longitudinal, Intergenerational Family Electronic Micro-Database Project (LIFE-M), a large scale longitudinal database to cover men and women born 1881-1930.