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The COVID-19 pandemic has created a serious and prolonged public health emergency. Older adults have been at substantially greater risk of hospitalization, intensive care unit admission and death due to COVID-19. As of February 2021, over 81% of COVID-19-related deaths in the US occurred in people over the age of 65. Growing evidence  from around the world suggests that age is the greatest risk factor for severe COVID-19 illness and for the experience of adverse health outcomes. Effectively communicating health-related risk information requires tailoring interventions to the needs of older adults.

Despite overall improvements in health and living standards in the Western world, health and social disadvantages persist across generations. Using linked nationwide administrative databases for 2.1 million Danish citizens across multiple generations, DUPRI’s Avshalom Caspi and Terrie Moffitt together with Leah Richmond-Rakerd at the University of Michigan and Signe Hald Andersen, Rockwool Foundation Research Unit, Denmark,  leveraged a unique three-generation approach to test whether different health and social disadvantages—poor physical health, poor mental health, social welfare dependency, criminal offending, and Child Protective Services involvement—were transmitted within families and whether education disrupted these associations.

Taken together, the bacteria, viruses, fungi and other microbes that live in our intestines form the gut microbiome, which plays a key role in the health of people and animals. In new research from Duke University, the University of Minnesota, and  the University of Notre Dame scientists found that genetics nearly always plays a role in the composition of the gut microbiome of wild baboons. In the study published recently in Science under the leadership of Jenny Tung and collaborators at Duke, UNM and Notre Dame, reserachers discovered that most bacteria in the gut microbiome are heritable after looking at more than 16,000 gut microbiome profiles collected over 14 years from a long-studied population of baboons in Kenya’s Amboseli National Park. However, this heritability changes over time, across seasons and with age. The team also found that several of the microbiome traits heritable in baboons are also heritable in humans.

Special diets, exercise programs, supplements and vitamins -- everywhere we look there is something supposed to help us live longer. Maybe those work: human average life expectancy has gone from a meager 40-ish years to a whopping 70-something since 1850. Does this mean we are slowing down death? A new study published in Nature comparing data from nine human populations and 30 populations of non-human primates says that we are probably not cheating the reaper. The researchers say the increase in human life expectancy is more likely the statistical outcome of improved survival for children and young adults, not slowing the aging clock.

The NIA supported Animal Models Research Network  under the leadership of Jenny Tung, Associate Professor of Evolutionary Anthropology and Biology at Duke University, Alessandro Bartolomucci, Associate Professor of Integrative Biology and Physiology at University of Minnesota, and Kathleen Mullan Harris,  James E. Haar Distinguished Professor of Sociology at UNC, has recently selected its 2021-2022 cohort of Bruce McEwen Career Development Fellows. These awards support outstanding junior scientists with high potential to advance the use of animal models or comparative approaches to understand the social determinants of health and aging.

The Population Division of the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs held held an  expert meeting on the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on fertility at the United Nations Headquarters in New York on 10 and 11 May 2021. Marcos Rangel, Associate Professor in the Duke Sanford School of Public Policy, presented  Pandemics and fertility: Lessons from the Brazilian Zika virus epidemics .

The Durham County Social Determinants of Health (DCSDH) is a large, address-level contextual database that merges multiple publicly available demographic, employment, tax, housing, and health metrics from Durham County into a single database. This dataset is being made available as part of DPRC's Durham Population Lab initiative and is of particular interest to researchers interested in population health, education, and employment. More information about the data set and how to access it can be found here. DUPRI has also contributed funding to provide subscription access to CMIE's Consumer Pyramidsdx data. This dataset, collected by Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy (CMIE) is the world’s largest household panel survey; it interviews over 174,000 households (and all members) three times a year since the panel was started in 2014. As of May 2021, the 23rd wave is currently being collected. The dataset has four components that provide demographic, employment, income, consumption, and time use data. The subscription provides access for Duke users through May 2022. More information about the dataset is available here. Instructions for accessing the data are available here. If you have questions about the data, please contact Manoj Mohanan. 

Female baboons may not have bills to pay or deadlines to meet, but their lives are extremely challenging. They face food and water scarcity and must be constantly attuned to predators, illnesses and parasites, all while raising infants and maintaining their social status. A new study appearing April 21 in Science Advances shows that female baboons with high life-long levels of glucocorticoids, the hormones involved in the ‘fight or flight’ response, have a greater risk of dying than those with lower level

As the premier conference for demographers and social and health scientists in the United States, the Population Association of America (PAA) not only offers an opportunity for faculty to present their research and learn about new findings, but it also provides Duke faculty, graduate students  and postdoctoral associates the opportunity to more fully engage with the broader population research community. In 2021 Duke researchers, post-doctoral students, and graduate students participating in the 2021 Virtual PAA Annual Meeting represent over forty scientific sessions and scientific panels on topics ranging from aging, health and longevity to innovative data collection methods and approaches. Check out the full preliminary schedule, and Duke’s PAA participation across the years.

In this study, investigators  sought to answer the question, “What social or early life experiences determine why some baboons biologically age faster than others?” This question is important to understanding why such experiences predict differences in fertility or survival, and provide insight into how different life experiences affect Darwinian fitness. The study team demonstrated  that DNA methylation-based “clocks” are strong predictors of age in wild primates. Contrary to expectation, neither early adversity nor social bond strength, which both strongly predict lifespan in the  study population, affect the rate at which these clocks tick. However, male baboons who compete successfully for high social status appear to age faster. By repeatedly sampling some of these males, the study also shows that the clock can speed up or slow down as males move up or down the social ladder. Thus, this measure of biological age seems to reflect the immediate experiences of the animals in the sample, and suggests that physical competition for high status is costly.