Laboratory

Population Health

At a Glance Projects Publications Team

Detailed Description

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Increasing longevity is both an impressive achievement and a major challenge for the world of high-income countries. Continued improvements in life expectancy inevitably contribute to population aging and will influence both the number of years people can expect to enjoy good health and the number of years they can expect to spend physically or cognitively disabled.

To quantify the extent to which increasing longevity is good or bad news at the individual and societal level, we seek to answer three key questions:

1. Are the extra years of life spent in good or in poor health?
2. What factors influence the health status, and how does this vary over the life course and across sociodemographic and spatiotemporal contexts?
3. Which methods, models, and measures are most suitable for tackling these issues and are thus a necessary prerequisite for the analysis of population health?

The Laboratory of Population Health seeks to address these three key questions from different angles, combining demographic, sociological, economic, epidemiological, and statistical perspectives.

With the near-linear increase in the length of life experienced by many countries, the questions of whether the extra years of life are healthy or unhealthy and whether they are equally distributed across sociodemographic subgroups have become key policy concerns. They are of critical importance for promoting individual well-being, projecting expected funding levels for social security and ultimately ensuring the sustainability of health and social welfare systems.

In our work, we adopt a cross-sectional and a life-course perspective to identify and quantify how major demographic, behavioral, and structural conditions affect population health.

We analyze the independent and interacting impacts on trends and differentials in health and mortality of:

1. behavioral determinants, such as cigarette smoking, excessive alcohol consumption, and obesity;
2. structural conditions such as living conditions, economic development, and access to health care;
3. sociodemographic factors such as family composition, educational attainment, migrant status, and ethnicity.

We use multidimensional measures of health based on information on physical and cognitive functioning, diagnosed conditions, medication use, and other factors. And we investigate how changes in the health status interact with all of these determinants within and across populations, covering a large number of countries, birth cohorts, and time periods.

New insights into the determinants and future of health, morbidity, and mortality require methodological innovations. We devote a substantial part of our work to developing methods, models, and measures that can be used to analyze various aspects of health and generate insights from new angles. These innovations include reconceptualizing the measurement of age, developing new methods for the analysis of population-level disability dynamics, advancing demographic decomposition techniques, and developing innovations in the visualization of demographic data and in the statistical analysis of causal relationships in demographic research.

The analyses conducted in the Laboratory of Population Health help to identify the harmful and the beneficial demographic and behavioral profiles and structural conditions that lead to populations either achieving high levels of health and life expectancy or lagging behind the high achievers. Analyzing the causal effects and pathways helps to identify efficient policy interventions for improving health and reducing health inequalities. The forecasting approaches we develop help us to better understand the future of health and the disability burden, both with and without policy interventions or medical innovations.