Research Group
Medical Demography
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Detailed Description
The Medical Demography research group will examine how the accumulation of diseases changes over the course of a lifetime and what these changes imply for longevity, population health, healthcare utilization, and population resilience. © iStockphoto.com / pcess609
Medical progress has fundamentally transformed how populations live with disease. Advances in diagnosis, treatment, and disease management have made medical progress one of the most powerful forces shaping population structure and dynamics. The result is a new demographic reality: Populations increasingly consist of individuals with complex disease histories, yet the presence of disease no longer necessarily implies poor health. This shift has far-reaching demographic consequences. Growing complexity in disease histories and the expanding role of disease management could create new layers of health inequality. At the same time, rising shares of individuals with chronic or managed conditions could make further improvements in population health harder to achieve. Medical progress may also reshape population health resilience – i.e., the capacity of a population to maintain health when exposed to external stressors such as pandemics, climate change, or health system strain – with consequences that are not yet well understood.
The Max Planck Research Group on Medical Demography investigates this new demographic reality by building and expanding the conceptual, methodological, and empirical foundations of medical demography. We address three core questions: How has medical progress changed the relationship between disease presence and disease impact, and how has this shift spilled over into broader population dynamics? How are changes in population health linked to the distribution of medical progress within and across populations, and through which pathways does medical progress reach different groups? Does medical progress make populations more or less resilient when they are faced with external stressors? To tackle these questions, we draw on a broad range of health data – including disease diagnoses, biomarkers, prescriptions, and data from both longitudinal and cross-sectional sources – and combine demographic and epidemiological approaches to develop new analytical frameworks for the field.