Swedish Research Council (VR) grant awarded to projects on aging research infrastructure

Laura Fratiglioni, professor and director of the Aging Research Center (ARC), is the principal investigator of the extended SNAC-K project and will head a new project that focuses on a national e-infrastructure in aging research. Both projects have received research infrastructure grants from the Swedish Research Council (VR).

The Swedish National Study of Aging and Care in Kungsholmen and Essingeöarna (SNAC-K) started in 2001. The goal of SNAC-K is to understand the aging process and to identify possible preventive strategies to improve health and care in older adults.

– SNAC-K is unique in its long-term and comprehensive data collection, and the grant of 4 million crowns from the Swedish Research Council provides very nice support for this work. The project currently includes 3300 participants. In the data-gathering process, the participants undergo a clinical exam, a nurse assesses their physical function, and a psychologist examines their cognitive function. Two cohorts will now undergo follow-ups financed by the grant from the Swedish Research Council, says Laura Fratiglioni.

The aim of the second project is to create an organization that will design and establish a National E-infrastructure for Aging Research (NEAR) in Sweden. Several national databases will be compared, their availability will be investigated, and technical solutions for data coordination will be proposed.

The aim is to develop a technical platform for running and coordinating high quality population-based databases in Sweden, to give the researchers access to information in them, and thus to create the prerequisites for future high-quality research. Several researchers from different universities in Sweden are participating.

– The main focus is to get several parties to agree on important issues. We need to ensure that researchers can guarantee the integrity and quality of their research. This is a first step toward a national infrastructure in aging research, which is a really important issue. Being awarded this grant is thus very positive and a signal that this issue is worth prioritizing, says Laura Fratiglioni.

Both grants are for 2016 and 2017.