Midlife Pace of Aging in the Dunedin Study

Declining fertility rates, aging of the baby-boomers, and increasing life expectancy are leading to population aging. As the population ages, this increases the public-health burden of age-related conditions, such as cardiovascular disease, type 2 diabetes, and dementia. Treating un-prevented diseases in late life has proven costly and ineffective. It is now known that potentially preventable risk exposures and physiological causes of age-related disease emerge in childhood. This recognition lends new scientific significance to studies that have followed cohorts from childhood. It is also now known that the pathogenesis of age-related diseases involves gradually accumulating decline in organ systems, beginning in the first half of the life course. Consequently, new interventions aiming to prevent age-related diseases will have to be applied to individuals while they are yet young, before they reach midlife. Translation of basic-science gerontology discoveries into preventive interventions for young humans is lacking because virtually nothing is known about the process of biological aging during the first half of the life course. This prompts our proposal to study the pace of biological aging from the twenties forward. We will use the Dunedin Multidisciplinary Health & Development Study, a longitudinal study of a birth cohort now entering its fifth decade. This study combines methods of demographic/economic surveys, clinical-quality health assessments, biobanking, and linkage to nationwide administrative records (health, welfare, finances). We propose to administer a full-day data-collection protocol to the 1004 living members of the birth cohort. To assess each cohort member's pace of biological aging we will: (a) measure biomarkers across multiple organ systems, and (b) statistically model correlated change in these biomarkers assessed at ages 26, 32, 38, and 45 years. We will describe individual variation in the pace of aging, plus its developmental origins, genomic signatures, functional consequences, associated cognitive changes, and economic costs. We will identify attributes that set apart individuals whose bodies are months or years younger than their chronological age. The proposed work will improve knowledge by generating findings to support future interventions during midlife or earlier, to slow aging, prevent age-related disease, and improve the quality of longer lives.

Declining fertility rates, aging of the baby-boomers, and increasing life expectancy are leading to population aging. As the population ages, this increases the public-health burden of age-related conditions, such as cardiovascular disease, type 2 diabetes, and dementia. Treating un-prevented diseases in late life has proven costly and ineffective. It is now known that potentially preventable risk exposures and physiological causes of age-related disease emerge in childhood. It is also now known that the pathogenesis of age-related diseases involves gradually accumulating decline in organ systems, beginning in the first half of the life course. Consequently, new interventions aiming to prevent age-related diseases will have to be applied to individuals while they are yet young, before they reach midlife. Translation of basic-science geroscience discoveries into preventive interventions for young humans is lacking because virtually nothing is known about the process of biological aging during the first half of the life course. This prompts our proposal to study the pace of biological aging from the twenties forward. We will use the Dunedin Multidisciplinary Health & Development Study, a longitudinal study of a birth cohort now entering its fifth decade. We propose to administer a full-day data-collection protocol to the 1004 living members of the birth cohort. To assess each cohort member's pace of biological aging we will: (a) measure biomarkers across multiple organ systems, and (b) statistically model correlated change in these biomarkers assessed at ages 26, 32, 38, and 45 years. We will describe individual variation in the pace of aging, plus its developmental origins, genomic signatures, functional consequences, associated cognitive changes, and economic costs. We will identify attributes that set apart individuals whose bodies are months or years younger than their chronological age.

Please see our "Pathways to Impact" statement for specific plans. Briefly...
The intended non-academic beneficiaries of this research are individuals who experience mental disorder, health-care providers, government, and taxpayers at large. Life expectancy is growing longer and longer. Policy makers and citizens
are concerned that our extra years of life should be healthy, productive, and enjoyable, not extra years of disease and disability. The hope of preventing age-related diseases and of increasing health expectancy requires research to identify candidate risk targets that can be treated successfully, in early life. Thus, our proposed research could potentially increase the political will to deliver preventions and treatments to individuals in midlife, before they develop age-related diseases. Such interventions in turn could reduce the burden of mental illness and age-related disease on the health-care delivery service. Reducing the burden of age-related diseases could in turn reduce costs to
government and taxpayers, and increase national productivity and wellbeing for the UK. Here we refer to the MRC Researchfish website's page entitled Dissemination of Research to Non-Academic Audiences for our MRC
Programme Grant, wherein we report the ways in which our research findings have been communicated to nonacademic users in the past 10 years. Full descriptions are provided for the following activities on the Researchfish site. We expect to engage in very similar dissemination activities in the next 5 years.

WWW.ALTMETRIC.COM records the following evidence of Dunedin Study impact beyond the ivory tower since September 2012: 132 published journal articles have 5,636 total mentions, in 262 unique newspaper-articles by science journalists, 232 blogs, 511 Facebook pages, 216 Wikipedia pages, 37 recommendations in Faculty-1000, and 4,148 twitters from 36 countries on all continents (Downloaded 2 September, 2015). In 2014 we were selected by Altmetric-UK as a demonstration research team at the 99th percentile on impact indicators across the different areas of clinical practice, social media, science media journalistic coverage, and policy documents originating in the UK.

In 2015 a 4-episode documentary film on our research was launched: Predict My Future: What makes us who we really are? http://www.moffittcaspi.com/content/science-us. This film series has been bought for distribution by BBC Asia: Brunei, Cambodia, China, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Laos, Macau, Malaysia, Mongolia, Myanmar, N Korea, Palua, Philippines, Singapore, S Korea, Taiwan, Thailand, & Vietnam. It has also been bought for distribution by Education TV Spain, Discovery Poland, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, and Qantas Airlines onboard entertainment. The documentary has only been marketed since December 2015, US and UK purchasers are expected.

High visibility public lectures by TE Moffitt and A Caspi, and our trainees, such as the 2013 Darwin Lecture at Cambridge, and the 2015 Keynote, International Convention of Psychological Science (ICPS)Amsterdam, both are on the internet.
Training videos disseminated to other research teams
Continuing-education teaching for medical professionals

As a result of these public dissemination activities, and others like them, our research under this programme grant
influences policy, as reported in detail on the MRC Researchfish website, which describes the recent examples below.
US Supreme Court Amicus Briefs
British Academy Policy Report
US National Academy of Sciences Panel on Demand for Drugs
Wrote DSM-V diagnosis for conduct disorder, ADHD and ODD
US National Cancer Institute Report
US Institute of Medicine Report
US National Academy of Sciences 21st Century Skills
Canadian Academy of Health Sciences Expert Panel
National Academy of Sciences, Advisory Committee on Law and Justice
Chair policy seminars at the Nuffield Foundation
Early Intervention Next Steps: A report to Her Majesty's Govt. by G Allen MP