Lecture: A New Look at Age and Aging

As one of the leading experts in the field of aging, World Population Program Deputy Director Sergei Scherbov was invited by the Central House of Scientists of the Russian Academy of Sciences to give a presentation on his latest research.

Together with IIASA colleague Warren Sanderson, Scherbov has developed new measures of age and aging in demographic research. They suggest to broaden research methods to account for significant increases in life expectancy, as the focus on chronological age of people alone provides a limited picture of the process, one that is often not appropriate for either scientific study or policy analysis. Their groundbreaking results have been published in Nature and Science and other high level journals. Scherbov is also Principal investigator of the Reassessing Ageing from a Population Perspective (Re-Ageing) project at IIASA that, among other things, ascertains the extent to which advanced societies are actually aging in multiple dimensions, including health, cognitive abilities, and longevity.

Presentation Abstract

Conventional measures for aging have been in use for many decades. They are widely used in many national and international organizations. In many instances policies in socio-economic fields are based on those measures. However, since traditional measures of aging do not take into account changes in people’s characteristics such as improvements in life expectancy and health, these measures are becoming increasingly inappropriate for both scientific and policy analysis. Recently, new measures of aging were developed that take into account, for example, changes in life expectancies. The threshold of who is considered old depends on life expectancy. The new measures of ageing will be applied to the population projections of the European countries and it will be shown that the prospects of aging are not going to look so gloomy compared to forecasts that are based on traditional measures.

Details:

Date: 16 March 2015, 6.30PM

Location: Central House of Scientists of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Blue Hall, Prechistinka, 16, 119034 Moscow, Russia

Last edited: 26 March 2015