‘Population laboratories’ or ‘laboratory populations’? Making sense of the Baltimore Longitudinal Study of Aging, 1965–1987

Unmaking old age: Political and cognitive formats of active ageing

“…This would result in a reduction in time spent with chronic illness, with an aggregate gain in 'health expectancy'. Fries' hypothesis, developed during a sabbatical at the IAS at Stanford University, was itself the corollary of a diverse set of research and policy ideas that brought together preventive medicine (Rose 1992) and the longitudinal approach to studying ageing (Moreira and Palladino 2011). This was mostly visible in Fries' strong belief on the "modifiability, or 'plasticity' of aging" through interventions such as weight control or exercise (Fries 1980:134).…”

Healthy diets, healthy hearing: National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, 1999–2002

“…A second useful approach has been longitudinal studies. One longitudinal study worth note is the Baltimore Longitudinal Study on Aging, which started in 1958 and includes more than 1,400 men and women, in their 20’s through their 90’s (Moreira & Palladino, 2011; Brant & Fozard, 1990). Another large-scale longitudinal study that has provided valuable information is the Epidemiology of Hearing Loss cohort from Beaver Dam, WI, and, more recently, the Beaver Dam Offspring Study, which now includes 5,275 adults born between 1902 and 1962 (Cruickshanks et al, 1998; Nash et al, 2011).…”

Unsettling Standards: The Biological Age Controversy

“…As Paolo Palladino and I (Moreira and Palladino ) have shown, these questions were fundamental to the dynamic that sustained the BLSA in its first three decades of operation. Established after a “second wave” of longitudinal research that focused on the understanding of the etiology of chronic illness, which included the celebrated Framingham Heart Study (1948), the BLSA, like many other cohort studies of aging, lay at the intersection of two different understandings of the institutional configuration of expertise in the management of aging, health, and illness.…”

“…In particular, I suggest that while BA advocates propose to differentiate between individuals by deploying ranking standards that distally embody the technical expertise of biometricians, skeptics prefer to emphasize that instrumented measurements of aging and health must always rely on the close pastoral guidance of biomedical experts. I argue that these two stances on aging standards have interacted to reinforce normative positions for and against the social and political organization of contemporary biomedicine (Moreira and Palladino 2009). In so doing, the article addresses a crucial but seldom explored question in the sociology of aging and the life course. While sociologists of the life course have been, at least since the late 1980s, focused on understanding the extent to which there has been a shift from a reliance on CA to segment the life course toward a destandardized, individualized life course in advanced economies, little attention has been devoted to the infrastructural processes that would support such a transition: What are the technologies, standards, and conventions that would, in practice, equip a personalized management of the life course?…”

“…Focused on a technical aspect of contemporary molecular biology, this controversy reached wider public attention because of the possible implications of reliable telomere testing for the management of the aging process for individuals and populations. Often conceived as a combination of genetic and environmental/lifestyle factors through which individuals become, at different rates, increasingly susceptible to illness, aging has, in the past three decades, been institutionally aligned with policies and programs that emphasize the role of preventive biomedicine and health maintenance practices (e.g., Butler et al 2008) as key to the maximization of older people's participation in the polity and the economy (Moreira and Palladino 2008). This, in turn, has sustained a renewed scientific interest in developing and validating measures of individual biological aging rate, or biomarkers of aging.…”