The Mid Term Review of the Project European Challenge for Healthy Ageing (ECHA )
The ECHA project (http://biologia.unical.it/echa(opens in new window)) gathers, under the coordination of Giovanna De Benedictis from the University of Calabria, scientists from four European countries (Italy, France, Germany, Denmark) that from different standpoints (genetics, immunology, epidemiology, demography) have studied for a long time aging and the social problems connected with the healthy/unhealthy aging. The social relevance of this question is evident, especially in western countries, where life expectancy has increased very rapidly since the 1960s, but the health status of the surviving population has not improved with the same rate. Although some researches have shown a small decrease in overall disability at older age, other reports have suggested that in the last three decades there has been an increase in the prevalence of disease, a reduction in the likelihood of having no disease and an increase in the number of co-morbidity in the aged population. It seems therefore that while the aged population is continuously growing, the number of people with major and multiple diseases is increasing in this segment of population. Therefore it seems essential to better understand the dynamic of longevity and of the healthy/unhealthy aging in order to allow the social system to give adequate help to the aged population. The aim of the ECHA project is indeed to understand the frailty, that is the functionality decadence and the increasing mortality risk that is typical of the elderly. Although frailty is emerging as an important issue in the study of the aging population, not much has been done to define it from an objective point of view. In addition, the causes of frailty and its consequences on longevity need to be better investigated. These complex problems are approached by the ECHA partners with a very innovative study design which represents a synthesis of the different experiences of the partners. The design is based on the analysis of centenarians, of their children and of the children of the centenarians sibs. As the centenarians sibs may be either long lived (older than 95) or short lived (dead at an age between 60 and 80), this design leads to have, along with centenarians, pairs of cousins who are discordant (very different) or concordant (very similar) as for age of death of the sib-pairs parent. In these subjects a thorough evaluation of many indicators of the health, psychological and social wellness is carried out. In addition, a blood sample is obtained from each subject to carry out routine laboratory analyses as well as DNA analyses. The data obtained from these analyses will be used for trying to subdivide the aging process in different discrete stages, which may represent different levels of frailty. Afterward the individual chance to go from one stage to the next and how different regressors may affect this chance will be estimated. Moreover, the ECHA design allows to evaluate the relationship between frailty and longevity, the hereditability of frailty and which portions of the genome are involved in longevity, in the aging rate and, finally, in the healthy/unhealthy outcome of the aging process. The implementation of the sampling of the ECHA project, that is to find centenarians and their respective children and nieces/nephews, has proved to be extremely troublesome. However, most of the problems have now been solved, also because of the great help provided by the local authorities of the areas where the sampling is going on. For this reason the first session of the Mid Term Review of the ECHA project will see the participation of the Mayors of Calabria, the Italian region that is one of the areas where the sampling is carried out (the others are the Languedoc-Roussillon in France and the provinces of Vejle and Funen in Southern Denmark). The subsequent sessions of the meeting will present the preliminary results obtained and the plans to implement the ECHA design. In spite of the problems encountered so far, the ECHA partners are pretty optimistic about their chance of being successful. This would certainly mean a great advance for the aging studies and for possibility to be helpful with elderly.,
Countries
Germany, Denmark, France, Italy