The Irish Longitudinal Study on Ageing Receives Award to Enhance Training and Development

Nov 11, 2011

The Irish Longitudinal Study on Ageing (TILDA) recently received €795,000 in funding under the Health Research Board’s (HRB) Interdisciplinary Capacity Enhancement (ICE) Awards scheme.  The funding will allow TILDA enhance its existing team by adding three new appointments focusing on neuropsychology, social epidemiology and health economics. 

Lead academic for TILDA and Trinity’s Professor of Geriatric Medicine, Rose Anne Kenny said: “These appointments enable TILDA researchers to further investigate the biological, psychological, and social correlates of mental illness in ageing.  New insights will be gained into the causal processes linking physical and mental health, the factors which predispose older people to develop mental health problems and how more effective interventions can be devised.  It will also be possible to quantify the economic costs of mental illness and propose improvements to health and social care policies. The TILDA research program has been designed not only to inform national policy but also ageing policy in other developed and developing cultures.”

The ICE Awards are development and training awards established to attract, engage and mentor postdoctoral researchers.  Sponsored by the HRB, the awards aim to develop Ireland’s capacity in population health and health services research by building partnerships between researchers, practitioners and decision makers in policy and health service delivery.  They are designed to facilitate interdisciplinary teams from a variety of disciplines to work collaboratively on projects.  Trinity’s TILDA project received one of four national awards.

The successful candidates will receive further training and mentorship from international collaborators at their respective institutions.  Collaborators include Professor Jim Smith, RAND Santa Monica, California; Professor Lisa Berkman, the Harvard Center for Population and Development Studies, Cambridge, Massachusetts; Professor Anne Newman, Centre for Ageing and Population Health, Pittsburgh; Professor Aartjan Beekman, The Longitudinal Aging Study Amsterdam; along with Trinity College Dublin TILDA  Principal Investigators, Professor Rose Anne Kenny, Professor Brian Lawlor, Professor Charles Normand, Professor Alan Barrett, Professor Cathal Walshe, Claire O’Regan and national collaborators Dr Patricia Kearney, UCC/TILDA and Professor Richard Layte, ESRI/TILDA.

The Irish Longitudinal Study on Ageing (TILDA) is a nationally representative study that aims to provide a research base to address the challenges posed by our population ageing.  At its core are large-scale surveys of over 8,000 people aged 50 and over who are living in Ireland.  Early results indicate a high prevalence of untreated mental health problems such as depression and anxiety.  This in turn suggests that older Irish people are potentially at high risk of physical illness and disability, cognitive impairment and dementia.