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NEAR - National E-Infrastructure for Aging Research in Sweden

The global increase in life expectancy is one of the greatest achievements of the last half century. However, the demographic development towards an older population poses tremendous societal and medical challenges globally, especially in developed countries such as Sweden. Promoting healthy ageing is therefore one of the most important commitments of the 21st century and to succeed, scientifically based knowledge of older individuals’ health- and care requirements are needed. To better understand the individual and population aging process, the National E-infrastructure for Aging Research (NEAR) was founded in 2018 to build and run a national infrastructure by integrating existing databases from the major population-based longitudinal studies on aging and health in Sweden. NEAR comprises 15 databases located at 8 different universities, which allows comparison, integration, and pooling of data from a large Swedish sample of 180 000 older adults aged 50+ years. NEAR includes information on clinical, biological, social, and environmental data that are assessed at the individual level by physicians, nurses, and psychologists on several occasions during a follow-up period ranging between 12 and 52 years. The creation of a national infrastructures, such as NEAR, is needed to achieve broad, multidisciplinary research perspectives that cannot be achieved by individual databases. Moreover, to address the increased health demands of an older population and enhance new opportunities for aging research, a critical mass of data is needed to increase sample sizes, variations, representativeness, and generalizability. Ultimately, this can lead to the identification of sustainable intervention strategies for better health and care for older persons in Sweden during the coming decades.

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