Chronic diseases tend to accumulate across life into multimorbidity, with severe implications for quality and duration of life; at the societal level, multimorbidity has negative effects on health care needs and costs and economic productivity. This topic is studied in an interdisciplinary, international collaborative research program. Components of the program focus on healthy aging; cardiometabolic health, like obesity, diabetes, and cardiovascular disease; cognition and dementia; loneliness and isolation; and the impacts of external factors on disease progression, such as the Covid-19 pandemic and environmental degradation. This set of projects, led by Professor Solveig A. Cunningham, expands our understanding of multimorbidity, its origins, and how it can be prevented or at least delayed.
This interdisciplinary, international collaborative research program is leveraging approaches from demography, epidemiology, and health sciences and data from the United States, Europe, and other countries. Collaborations include Emory University, University of Texas, Baylor University (USA), Javeriana University (Colombia), University of St. Andrews (Scotland), University of Copenhagen (Denmark), the Federal Institute for Population Research (Germany) and the International Institute for Population Studies (India), among others.
