Grant: Travel Awards - Institute Community Support

Recent demographic estimates showed that global population is ageing. Individuals over 60 years of age have more than doubled in numbers from 1980 to 2017, and these figures are expected to double again by 2050, reaching a staggering figure of 2.1 billion older persons. Even though there is emerging evidence that high levels of sedentary behaviour (SB) are detrimental, older populations spend around 9.4 hours per day in a sedentary state, and many of them do not engage in recommended physical activity (PA) levels. There is an on-going debate whether current guidelines on PA are appropriate for the aging population. In that sense, it would be extremely important to provide citizens with appropriate advice on the necessary amounts and modalities of PA and SB that would lead to meaningful health benefits. Disability-free life expectancy incorporates mortality and disability together, and has been considered as a crucial population health indicator for exploring whether the extra years lived have been spent in good or poor health. We will perform an Individual Patient Data (IPD) meta-analysis and use existing international longitudinal studies in order to identify minimal levels and patterns of SB and PA elderly individuals will need to engage in to increase DFLE by 2 years. IPD meta-analysis uses actual data from multiple cohort studies, rather than using data information taken from published articles alone. Before performing the IPD meta-analysis, complex retrospective data harmonization needs to be performed in order to integrate multiple datasets together, making provided information comparable to each other. Moreover, we will explore how the effects of these behaviours vary across populations of different age, sex, gender, ethnic background, and social status.