The Selska valley Study of Health and Aging: unraveling senescence, stress and frailty.

In this project we use an age-stratified sample of 100 men and 100 women aged 55 years and older who were residents of the Selska valley in order to explore two health indices, allostatic load (AL), and frailty. AL assesses lifelong stress responses using commonly assessed and clinically meaningful aspects of physiology; our frailty index assesses current somatic well-being using 5 aspects of functioning. Both correlate with clinical morbidity, self-reported health, life style, health history, and well-being. Our research site includes 9 villages located in the isolated Selska valley. Given their relative isolation, residents of this region provide a natural experimental setting for assessing stress, frailty, morbidity, and senescence in a local isolate. This isolated alpine setting provides numerous advantages for continuing research on health, disease and senescence. Our fieldwork protocols include detailed health demographic and SES interviews, measurement of blood pressure, anthropometry, walking speed, strength/endurance, and collection of blood and saliva samples for determinations of hormones, plasma proteins, and lipids. In this paper, we present one segment of data for 41 participants on self-report health and use of prescription medications during our 2008-2010 survey. In general, most participants rate themselves as being in good to excellent health (34/41 = 85%). However, over 66% are taking medications for a chronic condition, with about 25% taking 4 or more medications.