Ageing and Health is a longitudinal study on the health status of the Spanish population, directed by researchers from the Department of Psychiatry of the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid (UAM), the Collaborating Center of the World Health Organization, the Parc Sanitari Sant Joan de Déu (PSSJD) from Barcelona,and the Hospital Universitario de La Princesa, in Madrid. This project was supported by the European Community's Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007–2013) under grant agreement number 223071 (COURAGE in Europe); by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation ACI-Promociona (ACI2009-1010); by the Instituto de Salud Carlos III-FIS (research grant numbers PS09 / 00295, PS09 / 01845, PI12 / 01490, PI13 / 00059, PI16 / 00218, PI16 / 01073, PI19 / 00088, PI19 / 00103, PI19 / 00150, PI19 / 00235, PI22 / 00375, PI22 / 00340, PI22 / 00309 and PI22 / 00374); and by the Instituto de Salud Carlos III Centro de Investigación Biomédica en Red de Salud Mental (CIBERSAM). Since 2009, its objective has been to analyze the determinants of physical and mental health as people age through face-to-face interviews in the private homes of the participants. Information on households was provided by the National Statistics Institute.
The data that makes up the baseline was collected from a nationally representative sample of non-institutionalized adults as part of the “Collaborative Research on Aging in Europe (COURAGE in Europe)” project between July 2011 and May 2012. The second wave was carried out as part of the “Age with Health” project between December 2014 and June 2015, and three years later, in 2018, the third wave was carried out.
At the baseline, 4,753 participants were interviewed (2011 cohort), of which 2,528 were interviewed in the second wave and 1,577 in the third wave. In 2019-2021 3,002 participants were brought in (2019 cohort), 1,166 of whom were interviewed again by telephone during the first COVID-19 lockdown, in the middle of 2020. A new evaluation of the 2011 cohort was conducted in 2022, which included 963 participants, and a new evaluation of the 2019 cohort with 1,441 participants was conducted in 2023, while a new data collection of the both cohorts is expected to be carried out in 2025.
