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Grant Name: Oldest-Old Mortality - Demographic Models and Analysis: Administrative Core
Grant Number: P01 AG008761
Funding Agency: National Institute on Aging (NIA)
PIs: James W. Vaupel
Investigators/Advisors: Kaare Christensen
Effective Dates: 2004/05-2009/04
Approximate Amount/Year: $1,700,000
Approximate Total: $8,500,000
Description: James W. Vaupel, the Program Director, first received funding from the
National Institute on Aging for this P01 in 1990. The Program, now in
its 17th year, has an Administrative Core and 6 active projects:
projects 1,2,3,5,6,and 7. One of the projects that had been part of the
P01 - known as Project 8, became a separate NIA Research Project (R01)
in 2004. That project, Demographic Analysis of Healthy Longevity in
China, is now R01 AG023627 (no longer administered by PPARC). Zeng Yi is the PI and James Vaupel is one
of the project consultants.
The research proposed in this P01 is
driven by the concepts and methods of demography. All six projects
focus on research on exceptional longevity. Longevity has proven to be
remarkably plastic: environmental and genetic alterations can produce
large increases in longevity. Our overarching goal is explore the
nature of and limits to this plasticity. We address, among others, the
following questions: *Are death rates declining at the highest ages
and, if so, is the pace of decline accelerating or decelerating? *How
much will best-practice life expectancy (in the record-holding
population) increase over the course of the 21st century? *How long is
life expectancy for the group of individuals who have the optimal
characteristics (under the health conditions and levels of knowledge
that currently prevail)? *What are the characteristics that enable a
person to survive from his or her early 90s to age 100? *How much can
dietary manipulation extend the life expectancy of Mexflies? *How much
can the maximum observed lifespans of nematode worms be increased by
combinations of genes and by environmental manipulations? *Does
mortality tend to decline as a plant grows (with age), leading to
"negative senescence" and extraordinary longevity for plants that
manage to become large?
The Administrative Core is the nexus of
coordination among the projects in P01 AG08761. This includes the
management of personnel, budgets, preparation of IRB human subject
protocols (both medical and non-medical protocols), organization of
meetings and workshops, and other activities that are necessary for the
sharing of methodological and theoretical developments and empirical
findings.
(Note: The dollar amount includes the total of the amount awarded for the Admin. Core plus the amounts awarded for all projects of the P01 combined.)
CRISP Thesaurus Terms: aging,
developmental genetics, gene environment interaction, human mortality,
longevity, mathematics, statistics /biometry clinical research .