Canadian Association on Gerontology Conference 2015: Raising Awareness of the Canadian Longitudinal Study on Aging.

Jacob Andrews

Hello, I'm Jacob Andrews, PhD student in CATCH. My work involves using machine learning to detect the onset of depression in older adults, as part of the THAW network. I've been in Calgary, Canada attending the Canadian Association on Gerontology annual meeting. I'll be writing a couple of blog entries to highlight points arising that may be of interest to those researching gerontology in the UK.

On Friday 23rd October, masters and doctoral students were invited to a lunch with Dr. Yves Joanette, scientific director of the Canadian Institute of Health Research's Institute of Aging. In his talk, Dr. Joanette highlighted the Canadian Longitudinal Study on Ageing. This is a project following more than 50,000 individuals aged 45-85 over a 20 year period, measuring psychological, biological, medical, social and lifestyle factors of these individuals at regular intervals. The first data collection from these individuals has now been completed, and the data are ready to be mined. This represents an exciting project that anyone in the field of ageing could find interesting to explore. It adds to a number of longitudinal studies of ageing, and hopefully through doing research using data from such projects, we'll be able to gain a much better insight into how we age, and what causes the differences that occur in old age between individuals.

Please keep watching this space for more stuff from the conference!

Written by Jacob Andrews