CSIC receives 2.8 million euro to investigate the relationship between early-life health and mortality

A project of the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC) has obtained 2.8 million euro from the European Research Council (ERC) with an Advanced Grant to research for 5 years the relationship between health in the early stages of life and its long-term effects on morbidity, disability and mortality. The project is called ECHO and will be led by the Institute of Economics, Demography and Geography of the Centre for Human and Social Sciences.

“ECHO’s objective is to reformulate standard theories in health and mortality. It proposes new models to test the hypotheses linking developmental biology, epigenetics (changes in genetic activity due to environmental factors that do not alter the DNA sequence) and human diseases in adulthood, disability and mortality,” explains the head of the institute’s Population Department, Diego Ramiro Fariñas, who is collaborating on the project.

The project will be coordinated by Alberto Palloni, a sociologist from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, who will join the Institute from February 1st thanks to this European funding [note: the starting date of the project changed to March 1st, 2019]. The ECHO project aims to open up new lines of research, developing innovative formal models for the study of morbidity and mortality, testing new hypotheses on the evolution of human health and, as far as the findings allow, reformulating standard theories to make them applicable to a wider segment of the population.

Continue reading (in Spanish).