DataSet

National Institute on Aging (NIA)

The Piedmont Health Survey of the Elderly is one of four Established Populations for Epidemiologic Studies of the Elderly (EPESE), and complements the other three sites providing a population which is both urban and rural and contains approximately equal numbers of black and white participants across a broad socioeconomic base. The Duke site was originally funded by the National Institute on Aging, Epidemiology, Demography and Biometry Program (NIA/EDBP) to complete seven waves of data collection (three in person and four telephone interviews) in order to examine the health of a sample of 4,175 elderly persons, their uses of health services, and factors that influence their health and use of health services. The study was planned to provide data for researchers, policy makers and clinicians. A Resource Data Book detailing results from the baseline survey has been distributed to medical school libraries and schools of public health around the country. Sixty-eight publications have resulted from this study to date and an additional 90 analyses are under way. The Duke site has benefited from the planning process which involved investigators from all of the EPESE sites plus the NIA/EDBP staff, and in the development of questions and physical performance measures to be examined, to which Duke investigators have added questions reflecting their interests, and questions especially relevant to the Duke Sample. There are no plans for additional waves of the Piedmont Health Survey of the Elderly. The ten year follow up interviews were completed in December 1997. Cleaning of the questionnaire items is underway. Deaths that occurred between the third and fourth in person interviews will be identified by use of the National Death Index, and death certificates will be obtained to verify deaths and to collect information about place and cause of death. This data will be added to the files as received and will be cleaned as quickly as possible.

To perform a ten year, fourth in person follow up of the North Carolina EPESE cohort originally interviewed in 1986/87. The purpose of this follow up study is to obtain information on four primary outcome variables (cognitive status, depression, functional status, and mortality) and four primary independent variables (social support, social class, social location, and chronic illness). By using data from the four in person interviews across the ten years of follow up, investigators will be able to characterize trajectories of the major dependent variables and their relationships to the independent variables over time, which will provide valuable information about change and stability as well as heterogeneity in the dynamics of change. The major goal is to examine the relationships between social factors and chronic disease on the one hand and health outcomes on the other.

Duke Health

As mentioned above, results from the first seven waves of data collection from the Piedmont Health Survey of the Elderly have resulted in a Resource Data Book and some 60 publications in referred journals. Data from the first wave of the survey is in the public domain and can be obtained from NACDA (see Appendix) at the University of Michigan or from the National Archives, Center for Electronic Records (http://www.nara.gov/nara/electronic/) in Washington, DC.

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