Two-and-a-half decades of research in Malawi

As the country’s life expectancy has risen, the Malawi Longitudinal Study of Families and Health has shifted its current and future research to aging.

The Malawi Longitudinal Study of Families and Health has been going strong for 25 years thanks to a collaboration between the University of Pennsylvania and researchers in the sub-Saharan African country. As life expectancy has increased dramatically, they have shifted their focus from HIV/AIDS to emerging concerns about aging.

A new $10 million grant from the National Institutes of Health’s National Institute on Aging, the largest single grant the Malawi Longitudinal Study of Families and Health (MLSFH) has received, is funding cutting-edge research to fill a gap in understanding about aging in low-income countries.

“Aging in high-income countries has been studied for many years, and it’s a big and prominent and important research agenda, and we know a lot about this. Aging in poor countries is really understudied,” says Penn sociology professor Hans-Peter Kohler, co-director of the Population Aging Research Center and director of the MLSFH since 2006. That’s despite evidence that cognitive decline occurs at younger ages in low-income countries.

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