Cohort Profile: The Precipitating Events Project (PEP Study) - PubMed (original) (raw)

Cohort Profile: The Precipitating Events Project (PEP Study)

T M Gill et al. J Nutr Health Aging. 2020.

Abstract

The Precipitating Events Project (PEP Study) is an ongoing longitudinal study of 754 nondisabled community-living persons age 70 years or older who were members of a large health plan in greater New Haven, Connecticut, USA. The study was established to rigorously evaluate the epidemiology of disability in older persons and to elucidate the role of intervening illnesses and injuries on the disabling process. Of the eligible members, 75.2% agreed to participate and were enrolled between March 1998 and October 1999. Participants have completed comprehensive home-based assessments at 18-month intervals and have been interviewed monthly over the phone with a completion rate of 99%. Detailed participant-level data on health care utilization are obtained annually through linkages with Medicare claims. Through June 2019, 702 (93.1%) participants have died after a median of 109 months, while 43 (5.7%) have dropped out of the study after a median of 27 months. Death certificates are available for all decedents. To date, 117 original reports have been published using data from the PEP Study, including many focusing on other high priority areas such as end of life, frailty, depressive symptoms, aging stereotypes, pain, sleep, and methodologic research. The PEP Study welcomes proposals to access data for meritorious analyses from qualified investigators.

Keywords: Longitudinal study; disability; frailty; functional assessment; older persons.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors have no conflict of interest.

Figures

Figure 1:

Figure 1:

Assembly of study cohort. Persons who were physically frail were oversampled. After the prespecified number of nonfrail participants were enrolled, potential participants were excluded if they had a low likelihood of physical frailty based on the telephone screen and, subsequently, if they were found not to be physically frail during the in-home assessment

Figure 2:

Figure 2:

Disability trajectories in last year of life among 383 decedents. The severity of disability is indicated by the mean number of basic activities of daily living (ADLs) in which the participants had disability (possible range: 0 to 4). The solid lines indicate the observed trajectories, and the dashed lines indicate the predicted trajectories. The I bars indicate 95% confidence intervals for the observed severity of disability From Page 1177 (5). Copyright © 2010 Massachusetts Medical Society. Reprinted with permission.

Figure 3:

Figure 3:

Distribution of disability trajectories in last year of life, according to condition leading to death among 383 decedents. The values within the bars are the percentages of decedents with the disability trajectories From Page 1179 (5). Copyright © 2010 Massachusetts Medical Society. Reprinted with permission.

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