CONSORCIO ELDER. EL RETO DE ENVEJECER. Longevidad y envejecimiento

Subsidy to the consortia of the Scientific Missions of the Principality of Asturias.

Enrique Caso Onzain MY OMICS SL

Regional Ministry of Science, Innovation and University

2021-2022

Referencia: SV-PA-AYUD/2021/9867-2

Coordination of the social part of the project: CECILIA DÍAZ MÉNDEZ

Scientific coordination in UNIOVI. ANA MARIA COTO

 

Summary of the Pilot Project:
Although the concept of ageing can be defined globally, the heterogeneity of the older population makes it essential to identify its characteristics if we want to correctly analyse this group in order to offer guidelines for action that translate into effective support policies to tackle their problems efficiently and effectively. This requires a thorough knowledge of the characteristics that differentiate and define the elderly population of the Principality of Asturias, but this knowledge must be comprehensive, ambitious, both in socio-economic and contextual terms, in clinical, epidemiological, biological, technological and functional terms. It must include and make competent use of the extensive information that has been generated so far in our community on this subject, but which in our community on this topic but which currently appears dispersed and biased. dispersed and biased. With this intention in mind, this project involves sociologists, geriatricians, biologists, public administration, research centres, technology-based companies, biomedical technology-based companies, biomedical companies, but also care homes and the elderly themselves. elderly people themselves, assessing and studying our results and proposals. All all aimed at achieving the best characterisation of the elderly population, in this pilot project, replacing population, in this pilot project, replaced by the ELDER cohort as a population sample. population sample.

SUMMARY OF THE TEAM’S PARTICIPATION. SOCIAL Team of the ELDER project. This area has had the objective of tackling the analysis of ageing from a social perspective and its main task has been to carry out a survey aimed at finding out the living conditions of the population over 65 years of age in the Principality of Asturias. The particularity of this proposal lies in the need to combine the sociological data of this group with the data from the physiological analyses of the ELDER project itself.
To this end, several tasks have been carried out, all of them oriented to carry out a pre-test that could be taken as a reference for the development of a future project on the living conditions of the Asturian population over 65 years of age and that would combine measures of a social nature with measures of a physiological nature, both linked to the process of population ageing and applied in the Principality of Asturias.
It should be noted that it is common to find studies that analyse the social aspects of ageing or the physiological aspects of ageing separately. However, the novelty of the ELDER project lies in the combination of both perspectives, which has made it possible to have social and physiological data on the same study subjects. In addition, the incorporation of data analysts in the CONSORCIO has allowed the information from the measurements of both areas (social and biological) to be analysed jointly and to offer, for the first time, an approach to the ageing process, and more specifically to the frailty index, an indicator in which both social and biological dimensions are included.
In order to carry out the proposed survey, it is necessary to follow a research procedure that ends with a questionnaire containing all the areas that can be studied from a sociological point of view. Although the technical part of the questionnaire is carried out by the project team, it is necessary to hire a person to carry out the survey with the necessary training for its implementation in elderly people, a research assistant. It is therefore proposed to hire a person trained in Social Work and knowledgeable in social research techniques.