ANN ARBOR— The University of Michigan Health & Retirement Study, conducted by the U-M Institute for Social Research, has been awarded four grants totaling more than $19 million over the next two years, the National Institute on Aging, part of the National Institutes of Health, announced today.

The awards are part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act funds and will supplement the cooperative agreement between NIA and the U-M ISR.

“The Health and Retirement Study (HRS) is truly a national resource for scholars and policy makers interested in the health and economic conditions of Americans over the age of 50,” said James S. Jackson, ISR director. “We are delighted to have the opportunity to enhance the usefulness of this long-term research project with these new stimulus funds.”

“Since it began in 1992, the HRS has provided a wealth of information on the physical and economc health of older Americans,” said Richard Hodes, NIA director. “With this infusion of Recovery Act funds, we can augment the quality of the data we are collecting, expand minority participation in the study cohort, and add genetic analysis to the study.

The awards focus on data collection in four crucial areas:

Enroll approximately 3,000 new participants to the HRS through the addition of more than 1,000 African American and more than 1,000 Hispanic individuals. By more than doubling the number of minority adults in the study between the ages of 51 and 61, HRS researchers will be able to perform enriched analyses of this traditionally understudied segment of the population.

Repeat collection of biomarker and psychosocial data in 2010 through face-to-face interviews with approximately 9,200 participants, who first received these measures in 2006. This will enable researchers to analyze changes in these measures over time, link changes to other life circumstances and health events, and examine how change occurs across the broad age range of older persons represented in HRS.

Conduct genome-wide scans of previously collected saliva samples from approximately 13,000 HRS participants. As a result, researchers will be able to perfom multiple association studies to identify potential genetic risks and influences on a broad range of health conditions as well as social and behavioral aspects of normal aging and to better understand the environmental contexts in which genetic risk and protective factors are expressed.

Conduct follow-up research to the 2001-2003 Aging, Demographics and Memory Study to establish a consensus diagnosis of dementia, cognitive impairment without dementia or normal cognition for individuals in a subsample of 120 HRS participants age 70 or older. This will set the stage for a better understanding of trends in the prevalence, causes, and outcomes of dementia in the United States.

Integral to the success of the proposed expansion in the minority cohort, the Social Security Administration (SSA) has increased its long-standing support of the HRS, providing an additional $3 million over the next two years. These funds provide support for the interviews of the new minority sample expansion; SSA’s participation will also include linkages to pension and earnings data for these new members of the HRS, contributing to the enhancement of a valuable research data resource.

“We are gratified by the commitment of the Social Security Administration to the enlargement of the Health and Retirement Study’s minority sample,” said Richard Suzman, Ph.D., director of NIA’s Division of Behavioral and Social Research, who was instrumental in conceptualizing and starting the study two decades ago. “This will allow for more in-depth analyses of minority population data, which is critically important at a time when the older population is becoming more diverse.”

Suzman also highlighted the opportunities for cutting-edge analyses that will be afforded as a result of the Recovery Act funding. “We are excited by the potential for transforming social and behavioral science by adding genetic information to such a large, national longitudinal study,” he said. “The ability to link genetic information with social, psychological and economic data should result in much deeper understanding of how we age.”

“The HRS is an outstanding partnership between government and academic research and these new funds will create exciting new opportunities for the thousands of researchers around the country and around the world who make use of this great resource,” said ISR economist David Weir, principal investigator of the HRS. “We also expect to see new additions to the more than 10,000 individuals who have already registered to use the data, and the more than 1,000 authors and co-authors who have published more than 1,400 publications and dissertations. This success has made it a role model for studies in more than 20 other countries who are now contributing to a remarkable international collaborative agenda for research on aging.

Now in its 17th year, the HRS follows more than 22,000 people over the age of 50 every two years, providing data from pre-retirement to advanced age. To keep the study fully representative of the population, the HRS regularly adds new cohorts of those who have turned 50. A major goal of the study is to help provide data to inform scientific and policy regarding the nation’s aging population. Through long-term collection and analysis of health and economic data, the HRS paints a detailed portrait over time of older Americans’ physical and mental health, insurance coverage, financial well-being, labor market status, retirement planning, support systems, transfers of time and money across generations, and living arrangements.

Established in 1949, the University of Michigan Institute for Social Research (ISR) is the world’s largest academic social science survey and research organization, and a world leader in developing and applying social science methodology, and in educating researchers and students from around the world. ISR conducts some of the most widely-cited studies in the nation, including the Reuters/University of Michigan Survey of Consumer Attitudes, the American National Election Studies, the Monitoring the Future Study, the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, the Health and Retirement Study, the Columbia County Longitudinal Study and the National Survey of Black Americans. ISR researchers also collaborate with social scientists in more than 60 nations on the World Values Surveys and other projects, and the Institute has established formal ties with universities in Poland, China, and South Africa. ISR is also home to the Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR), the world’s largest digital social science data archive. Visit the ISR Web site at http://www.isr.umich.edu for more information.
For more information on the study, visit the study website: http://hrsonline.isr.umich.edu/

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• Health and Retirement Study