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The Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE)

http://www.share-project.org/

Overview
The Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE) is a panel survey that places the health of older Europeans in a broader context. It complements existing national health surveys by providing opportunities to examine how health is shaped by the social, economic, and family context of older Europeans in a panel design. SHARE combines three major strengths, which make it a truly unique and innovative infrastructure worldwide. First, it is ex-ante harmonized across countries, which allows comparing the effects of the different health and welfare systems in the European countries on individuals and families. Second, it is multi-disciplinary and fills an important research vacuum, namely the interaction between health and socio-economic factors. Third, SHARE is longitudinal, i.e., the same individuals are repeatedly being interviewed to understand their individual aging processes and their responses to ongoing social and political changes.

Data Collection
SHARE has so far collected three waves of data through more than 110.000 interviews of individuals aged 50 and over in Austria, Belgium, Czech Republic, Denmark, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, Spain, Sweden, and EU-associated Switzerland and Israel. A unique feature of SHARE is that it builds on existing European surveys by incorporating a wider array of assessments that include multiple measures of self-rated health, specific chronic and acute diseases, symptoms, multiple measures of disability and functioning, mental health, cognitive function, and objective measures of performance (grip strength, walking speed, chair stand, and peak-flow).

Biomarkers
SHARE implemented grip strength and walking speed as physical performance measures in its very first wave. Following the success of these measures, further measures, namely chair stand and peak-flow, were added in wave 2. These measures were chosen since SHARE has primarily been focused on developing and implementing harmonized measures of health that can be compared across European countries, as well as other internationals surveys such as the English Longitudinal Survey of Ageing (ELSA) and the US Health and Retirement Survey (HRS). In wave 3, grip strength was the only biomarker (performance measure) being checked.

Wave 4 of SHARE, for which data collection has started very recently, will add blood biomarkers to the study in selected countries. The collection of these biomarkers is  being tested in Germany only, but an extension over all participating countries is planned for future waves. We will collect blood for dried blood spots (DBS), which will be analyzed in a laboratory for total cholesterol or ApoA1/ApoB (which one is still to be decided), HbA1c, and C-reactive protein. The results from the lab will then be linked to the SHARE dataset.

In summer 2010, SHARE conducted a small pre-test for wave-4 (125 interviews, 86 individuals agreed to DBS sampling) in Germany to test the protocols and logistics of the biomarker collection as well as the collaboration with the lab analyzing HbA1c and CRP and testing a method for lipid estimation (total cholesterol vs ApoA1/ApoB). Also in wave 4 in Germany, SHARE will measure height (additionally to self-reported height of the respondents), waist circumference, and blood pressure.

Publications
http://www.share-project.org/publications.html