COHORT PROFILE Cohort profile: The Dynamic Analyses to Optimize Ageing (DYNOPTA) project

Like other industrialized countries, Australia is facing major population ageing. From 2000 to 2025, the number of Australians aged 65 years and over will more than double, as a result of the ageing of the baby boom cohort and increasing life expectancy, while the number of people in working age groups will decline. To guide constructive responses to this unprecedented change, the Government’s Minister on Ageing released the National Strategy for an Ageing Australia which set key issues for national policy development, to be underpinned by policy. In 2003, the Australian Prime Minister’s Science, Engineering and Innovation Council (PMSEIC) brought together leading researchers and policymakers who prepared a report articulating an evidence-based vision for healthy ageing in Australia and an associated programme of longitudinal research to guide the achievement of ‘an additional 10 years of healthy life expectancy’ by 2050. That same year, the Australian government established ‘Ageing Well, Ageing Productively’ as a National Research Priority goal. In 2004 the Australian Research Council (ARC) and the National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) funded national research networks including the Research Network in Ageing Well (RNAW) to lead and facilitate collaboration in multidisciplinary large scale research on ageing, build research capacities and international collaborations, and improve communication and translation with key constituencies (www.ageingwell.edu.au). In 2004, the NHMRC and ARC announced a strategic funding initiative to facilitate research into ageing that is multisectorial, multidisciplinary and cross-institutional. The goal of this was to develop an authoritative evidence base for policy and practice in the priority area of Ageing Well, Ageing Productively. Collaborators from nine Australian Longitudinal Ageing studies, together with demographers, statistical and modelling experts, subsequently proposed the Dynamic Analyses to Optimize Ageing (DYNOPTA) project which received funding for a 5-year programme grant that commenced in 2007. The broad aims of DYNOPTA reflect the vision of the PMSEIC report to identify effective pathways to compressing morbidity and optimizing ageing. DYNOPTA has constructed a pooled dataset comprising information from nine Australian Longitudinal Studies of Ageing (LSA). Data were harmonized from the contributing studies (described in Table 1) to * Corresponding author. E-mail: [email protected] 1 Centre for Mental Health Research, Australian National University, Canberra, ACT, Australia. 2 Research Centre for Gender, Health and Ageing, University of Newcastle, Newcastle, New South Wales, Australia. 3 School of Psychology, Flinders University, Adelaide, South Australia, Australia. 4 Department of Ophthalmology, University of Sydney, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia. 5 School of Mathematics and Applied Statistics, University of Wollongong, Wollongong, New South Wales, Australia. 6 The Australian Demographic & Social Research Institute, Australian National University, Canberra, ACT, Australia. 7 School of Primary Health Care, Monash University, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia. 8 School of Public Health, University of Sydney, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia. 9 Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies, Australian National University, Canberra, ACT, Australia. 10 Prince of Wales Medical Research Institute, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia. 11 Baker IDI Heart and Diabetes Institute, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia. 12 College of Health Sciences, University of Sydney, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia. The online version of this article has been published under an open access model. Users are entitled to use, reproduce, disseminate, or display the open access