PhD conferral ms. Sarah W. Mount, MSc.

Key words: healthy ageing, COPD, lifestyle

“Conceptualisations of successful ageing and leads for lifestyle modification”

The purpose of this thesis is to understand how we can help people to age better so that we can better make predictions and improve interventions. However, there is lack of consensus as to how to exactly define healthy ageing. To study this, we used a model of accelerated ageing, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. We studied how different lifestyles affect the likelihood of developing disease, and how genes interact with each other and the environment to determine if someone will develop disease. Moreover, how disease could be influenced, namely if we could influence behaviour by using brain training in people with a chronic condition.  Considering this information together and separately we then examined how multiple measurements of health could be combined and if it was then predictive of successful ageing proxies.