Hi Giola Santoni, PhD student at the Aging Research Center. On 6 June you defended your thesis “How well are we aging? Capturing the complexity of health trajectories of older adults”, what’s the main focus of the thesis?

“The aim of this thesis was to evaluate how well people are aging, taking the complexity of their health status into account. Despite its positive nature, population aging represents a public health challenge that could be alleviated by maintaining good health during older age. To this aim, we verified temporal trends of disability in the older Swedish adults between 1991-2010 taking into account occurrence, number of years of life lived with disability. We also developed a health assessment tool (HAT) for older people by using four clinical indicators (physical function, cognitive function, morbidity, and disability) and detected age-related variation and individual health trajectories over time. Finally, we proposed a novel approach to monitor older individuals’ health changes through reference health curves that can help delineate ad-hoc public health and care actions”
Read the full interview here: http://ki.se/en/nvs/ways-to-evaluate-how-well-people-are-aging-taking-the-complexity-of-their-health-status-into