Blog
Entries by Theodore D Cosco
(22 entries)
Midlife Milestones Past and Present
Today, as I celebrate my 40th birthday, I find myself at a unique crossroads between my personal journey and my professional trajectory as a gerontologist and epidemiologist. This milestone offers ...
A Personal Reflection on Retrogenesis: Infant Cognitive Development and Cognitive Decline in Older Adults
Watching my young daughter expand her cognitive capacity alongside witnessing the cognitive challenges faced by my father, who lives with dementia, has highlighted to me the cyclical nature of huma...
ChatGPT: A Game-changer for Personalized Mental Health Care for Older Adults?
Mental health is an increasingly important issue facing the expanding population of older adults. The landscape of mental health challenges for older adults is multifaceted, with concerns ranging f...
Resocializing: Social connectedness in a post-pandemic world
If the last years have taught us anything, it is the importance of social connectedness. Worldwide sweeping measures were put in place to limit the degree to which people could gather, connect, and...
Pandemic related stress: Strategies for older adults, their families, and their caregivers
As we look back on the arrival of the COVID-19 pandemic in Europe in 2020, we can reflect more objectively on the wider consequences. One of these was undoubtedly an increase in general...
Integrating stable and modifiable aspects of resilience into healthy aging
Of the many challenges in life course epidemiology is unpacking the complex interrelationships between stable and modifiable attributes across a lifetime of unique experiences and exposures that im...
Long-term implications of high-stress occupations in midlife: The role of resilience resources
Although there are many health-related advantages to higher socioeconomic position, the relationship between high job-strain, work-related stress, and psychosocial working conditions in midlife can...
A COVID-19 catch-22: Challenges and opportunities of social connection technologies
Having just crossed the threshold of a year since COVID-19 became a global pandemic, there has been ample time to observe the ways in which technology has been used as a means of fostering social c...
Social media, knowledge translation, and gerontological research
Social media platforms have become a ubiquitous part of our daily lives with inroads into sports, politics, and increasingly, research. With humble beginnings as software developed with the intent ...
Canadians Aging in Place
As Canada celebrates its 153rd birthday this July 1, the population of aging Canadians continues to expand with more than 6.5 million people aged 65 and older and approximately 7% of these individu...
Resilience in older adults: Methodological challenges
When faced with the challenges of growing older, some people fare better than others when they experience similar levels of adversity. We call this “resilience”. The likelihood of...
Technology, ageing, and the importance of including older adults in research
As the the world experiences a global demographic shift towards older adults, we are simultaneously experiencing an unprecedented expansion in technological innovation. Naturally, these two phenome...
Silver Stoners: Cannabis use amongst older Canadians
Older adults are the fastest growing demographic of Canadian cannabis users; however the implications of cannabis use for older adults are largely unknown. Despite this, there are a number of sugge...
Precision medicine approaches to mental health
In an age where the collection of data is accelerating at unprecedented rates, the ways in which we use these data are as diverse as the devices used to collect them. The ubiquity of smartphone dev...
Ageing Canadians: AGE-WELL & Canadian Association on Gerontology Annual Scientific Meeting Recap
Canada is unique in having a relatively small and very geographically diverse population of older adults. Ageing Canadians do, however, benefit from several dedicated groups of gerontologists, nota...
Peer-review: an essential, but imperfect, part of the scientific process
Peer-review forms the backbone of scientific publication. Intended as a quality control mechanism, the hope is that peer-review will permit only the most rigorously conducted scientific studies to ...
Bridging the digital divide amongst older adults
Innovations in modern technology have revolutionized healthcare as we know it. Unprecedented advances in the mechanisms used to capture and analyse data have increased the capacity to predict and m...
Longitudinal Perspectives on Ageing
Theodore D Cosco Longitudinal research methods have been a staple of gerontological research, providing myriad insights into the processes of ageing and the mechanisms that underpin the heterog...
“Demography, Ageing and Health” Conference
The recently convened “Demography, Ageing and Health” conference, hosted by the Oxford Institute of Population, brought together emerging researchers and established academics in a melt...
Ageing Canadians
The Canadian Longitudinal Study on Aging will collect data on over 50,000 older adults for 20 years The Canadian Longitudinal Study on Aging (CLSA) is the jewel in the crown of Canadian epidemio...
Ageing Canadians: Census reveals more seniors than children living in Canada
The 2016 Canadian census results were released on May 3 and have revealed that there are a greater number of older adults than children, for the first time in census history. Statistics Canad...
The world’s longest studied birth cohort turns 70 – here’s what they’ve told us
The world’s oldest continually running birth cohort study – the MRC National Survey of Health and Development – turns 70 this month. A birth cohort study is one where a represe...