The Melbourne Longitudinal Studies on Healthy Ageing (MELSHA) Program

The MELSHA program is concerned with the discovery of modifiable determinants of healthy ageing to inform population level and clinical interventions. This program is being conducted in partnership with the University of Sydney. MELSHA commenced in 1994 when a baseline survey of 1000 people aged 65 year and over living in non-institutional settings was conducted in Melbourne, Australia. The sample has been followed up annually and we recently won an NHMRC grant to continue the study until 2010. We are currently partnering with major Chinese and Japanese teams who are also conducting similar longitudinal studies. Recently the MELSHA program has entered an exciting phase as we now have enough data to definitively study the determinants of healthy ageing outcomes.