Your Lifespan
VISION 20/20
10 scientific innovations
Canadian experts review their research into everything from sexuality to robotics to genetics, all designed to help older adults age well, while we offer a glimpse of the future
With a new decade comes a new opportunity to take stock of what we know about healthy aging and what we might learn in the decade to come.
What kinds of exercise can help us age well? Does ethnicity play a role in how we age? How are Canadians dealing with aging and sex? These are important questions. The older cohort – the baby boomers and genXers – represent nearly 45 per cent of Canada’s population, or 16,753,198 people. By 2030, Statistics Canada estimates it will be 46.5 per cent, or 19,461,400 people.
The World Health Organization’s 10 Priorities for a Decade of Action on Healthy Ageing makes it clear that an effective plan requires better global data. As the WHO states, “What gets measured gets done.”
Canadian researchers are stepping up. That includes scientists working on the most comprehensive study of aging in the world, led by investigators at McMaster, McGill and Dalhousie universities. It’s called the Canadian Longitudinal Study on Aging (CLSA) and it has been amassing reams of data on more than 50,000 older adults since 2010, when researchers began collecting information on the lives of participants between the ages of 45 and 85.
“Aging is as much a social phenomenon as it is a biological phenomenon,” says McMaster University’s Parminder Raina, the study’s lead investigator.
“If you want to understand the biology of aging, you really have to understand the social aspects, psychological aspects, economic aspects and so on.”
Add to that the work of the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research and universities across the country, and we have a wealth of expertise to tap. In that spirit, we asked 11 Canadians working on agingrelated projects to tell us about the biggest advances in their fields in the last decade and what’s on the horizon. Then we do some crystal-ball gazing of our own to highlight some of the groundbreaking work underway at home and abroad.