Research supported and conducted by NIA is helping to identify lifestyle factors and health behaviors that directly influence physical, cognitive, sensory, and emotional health and risk of disease as people age, such as research linking work and social engagement to cognition. NIA will support and conduct research to verify these linkages and to better understand their underlying mechanisms. Evidence suggests that addressing these factors and their interplay are critical to minimizing disease and achieving full potential and vitality as people age. Basic behavioral science is uncovering individual-level psychological, social, and behavioral factors that predict adaptive and healthy aging or confer risk for age-related decline. A more comprehensive understanding of the causal pathways through which behavior, personality, social relationships, and socioeconomic circumstances are associated with health and well-being outcomes may suggest novel targets for intervention.įurthermore, we now know that behavioral and social factors interact with genetic, molecular, and cellular mechanisms to influence health at older ages. And the relationship between personality - relatively stable individual differences in dispositions to think, feel, and act in particular ways - and aging-related outcomes has been well documented: Conscientiousness is related both to longevity and to the development of AD, and neuroticism is linked to health in both positive and negative ways. For example, subjective feelings of loneliness are known to be a risk factor for serious functional declines and even death, and converging lines of evidence from multiple cross-national epidemiological studies indicate that social isolation is a major risk factor for morbidity and premature mortality. Social factors, such as social relationships and socioeconomic circumstances, have a similarly important impact on health and well-being. can be attributed to adverse health behaviors such as smoking as well as unhealthy diet that result in obesity. Studies have shown that up to 50% of preventable deaths in the U.S. Goal B: Better understand the effects of personal, interpersonal, and societal factors on aging, including the mechanisms through which these factors exert their effectsīehavioral and psychological factors - for example, physical activity, smoking and other health behaviors, cognitive and social engagement, personality, and psychosocial stress - play a critical role in health across the lifespan.
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