The cohort of the NINFEA project participates in STAGE whose ambitious objective is to investigate how to undermine the paradigm that makes old age a comorbid condition.

By 2050, the population aged 75 and over is expected to double in almost all European countries. This demographic projection evokes social and health scenarios that require integrated and flexible solutions, which start from the single individual and involve the collective sphere. The possibility for a person to stay healthy during aging will increasingly depend on their ability to adopt healthy lifestyles, through simple and accessible primary prevention measures.

STAGE is a collaborative project coordinated by the University of Oulu, Finland, which will involve longitudinal cohorts and biobanks in order to investigate the entire existential span of people to understand how to prevent multiple chronic diseases from affecting old age.

Addressing these challenges requires gaining a deeper understanding of people's different environments and lifestyles, social stressors and the biology of aging.

Thanks to a "life course" approach and a digital approach, the project will generate biopsychosocial models and "age-friendly" tools assisted by artificial intelligence, to detect, prevent and reduce the risk of aging with multi-morbidity.

Twenty-two partners from research institutes, small and medium-sized enterprises and an NGO from eleven different countries participate in STAGE, creating a multidisciplinary team capable of exploring all aspects inherent to the old age-wellbeing combination: from ethics to management of health systems, from the environment to participatory science, from life course epidemiology to economics, from molecular studies to reliable artificial intelligence, from the design of integrated systems to nursing and health care, from patient protection to the management of communication and knowledge.

The six-year STAGE project received a total grant of €17.7 million from Horizon Europe. The launch of the institutional website is expected in April, but from today STAGE can be followed on social media:

  • @STAGEProjectEU on X
  • The STAGE Project on LinkedIn