Grant: Catalyst Grant: Pilot Projects in Aging - Biological & Clinical Aspects of Aging

Canada has been facing a steady increase in the average age of its population. This shift in age of the population has made it very important to understand why some people experience healthy aging and others do not. The Canadian Longitudinal Study on Aging (CLSA) aims to learn more about the changes linked with aging by enrolling 50,000 Canadian residents and studying how many different components of healthy aging interact. Although the CLSA will be able address many research questions, some questions will require a larger sample than that of the CLSA to answer. One way to answer questions that require a very large sample size is to combine data from a number of similar studies on healthy aging. The difficulty is that studies may use different questionnaires to collect the same sort of information. For example, one study may ask people the number of glasses of red wine they consume per week and another may ask the number of glasses of wine they consume in a month. The first task is to determine whether these questions are collecting the same type of information and if so, how can the data be converted so that they are on the same scale. In example above the task is quite easy, but in many cases it will be more challenging. We propose to use a new methodology that has been developed by the Public Population Project in Genomics (P3G) to decide whether data can be combined from different studies and to convert the study-specific information into a common format so that it can be analysed together. This methodology, however, is relatively new and requires testing to make sure that the process provides accurate information on which to answer important research questions in aging. This study will examine whether the P3G method can be used by to harmonize data from large cohort studies on aging to answer research questions that require a very large sample size.