Studies of health, retirement and living arrangements of the aging population in

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DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): We propose to use data collected from "China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Study (CHARLS): Pilot" funded by the parent grant to conduct joint collaborative research between NIH-funded scientists and LMIC (China) researchers on health and aging issues in China. The training and research conducted in this project will greatly increase the abilities of the Chinese researchers engaged in this project to conduct future high-quality scientific research on health and aging issues. This training will, in addition, have positive spillover to high income country (HIC) scientists because some of the future research done by our Chinese trainees will be joint with scholars from high income countries, like the United States. Engaging in such cross-country collaborative research can have high payoffs in leading to scientific advances in our knowledge of health and aging. We have just finished collecting the data funded by the parent grant. The data covers 1,575 randomly selected households in two provinces, Zhejiang and Gansu, and 2,951 individuals 45 and older and their spouses. Although a pilot, the sample size is large enough to enable serious scientific analysis. CHARLS is the first publicly available data set on the elderly in China that is so broad in its content and designed explicitly after the HRS. We will focus on four research topics. 1. The gradients between socio-economic status (SES) and different dimensions of health; 2. Underdiagnoses of certain diseases associated with population aging, specifically, the differences between biological measurements taken by the survey nurse and reported doctor diagnoses, and what SES factors underlie these differences; 3. The retirement behavior of the elderly and its relationship to health; 4. The living arrangements of the elderly and their relationships to health. This research will be done primarily in China at Peking University as an extension of NIH Grant No. 1R21AG031372-01, 09-30-2007 to 8-31-2009. We have a two PI team for this proposal. The contact PI (Y. Zhao, Peking University of China) is PI of the parent grant. The other PI, J. Strauss, University of Southern California, is co-PI of the parent grant. A. Park, co-PI of the parent grant, will serve as co-PI of this project. PUBLIC HEALTH RELEVANCE: Public Health Relevance Statement The project, "Studies of health, retirement and living arrangements of the aging population in China: Initial evidence from the pilot of the China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Study (CHARLS)", will greatly enhance the capacity to do research in health and aging in China by training young Chinese scholars, using the first major broad-purposed, public available data set on aging in China, CHARLS.