1. Development of a common scale for measuring healthy ageing across the world: results from the ATHLOS consortium
- Author
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Seppo Koskinen, Laia Egea-Cortés, Matthew Prina, Yu-Tzu Wu, Albert Sanchez-Niubo, Francisco Félix Caballero, Sergei Scherbov, Jerome Bickenbach, Ilona Koupil, Holger Arndt, Ivet Bayes-Marin, Carlos G. Forero, Javier de la Fuente, Fernando Rodríguez-Artalejo, Demosthenes B. Panagiotakos, Matilde Leonardi, Iago Gine-Vazquez, Alberto Raggi, Alejandro de la Torre-Luque, Andrzej Pająk, Beatriz Olaya, Martin Bobak, Esther García-Esquinas, Abdonas Tamosiunas, Elena Critselis, Warren C. Sanderson, Josep Maria Haro, Martin Prince, Somnath Chatterji, José Luis Ayuso-Mateos, Blanca Mellor-Marsá, Beata Tobias-Adamczyk, Stefanos Tyrovolas, and Christina Daskalopoulou
- Subjects
Aging ,Epidemiology ,Health Status ,Envejecimiento ,030204 cardiovascular system & hematology ,Logistic regression ,Item response theory ,Cohort Studies ,Integración de datos ,0302 clinical medicine ,Equating ,030212 general & internal medicine ,Functional ability ,Teoría de respuesta a ítems ,Aging activities of daily living ,General Medicine ,scale ,Healthy aging ,Convergent validity ,Scale (social sciences) ,Capacitat intrínseca ,Intrinsic capacity ,Data integration ,Psychology ,functional ability ,Concurrent validity ,intrinsic capacity ,Teoria de resposta a ítems ,03 medical and health sciences ,Envelliment ,Healthy ageing ,Functional capacity ,Capacidad funcional ,Humans ,AcademicSubjects/MED00860 ,Envejecimiento saludable ,Reproducibility of Results ,Capacidad intrínseca ,Differential item functioning ,data integration ,Ageing ,item response theory ,Capacitat funcional ,Envelliment saludable ,Integració de dades ,Activitats d’envelliment de la vida diària ,Actividades de envejecimiento de la vida diaria ,Demography - Abstract
Background Research efforts to measure the concept of healthy ageing have been diverse and limited to specific populations. This diversity limits the potential to compare healthy ageing across countries and/or populations. In this study, we developed a novel measurement scale of healthy ageing using worldwide cohorts. Methods In the Ageing Trajectories of Health-Longitudinal Opportunities and Synergies (ATHLOS) project, data from 16 international cohorts were harmonized. Using ATHLOS data, an item response theory (IRT) model was used to develop a scale with 41 items related to health and functioning. Measurement heterogeneity due to intra-dataset specificities was detected, applying differential item functioning via a logistic regression framework. The model accounted for specificities in model parameters by introducing cohort-specific parameters that rescaled scores to the main scale, using an equating procedure. Final scores were estimated for all individuals and converted to T-scores with a mean of 50 and a standard deviation of 10. Results A common scale was created for 343 915 individuals above 18 years of age from 16 studies. The scale showed solid evidence of concurrent validity regarding various sociodemographic, life and health factors, and convergent validity with healthy life expectancy (r = 0.81) and gross domestic product (r = 0.58). Survival curves showed that the scale could also be predictive of mortality. Conclusions The ATHLOS scale, due to its reliability and global representativeness, has the potential to contribute to worldwide research on healthy ageing.
- Published
- 2021