Page - 16 - in options, Volume summer 2017

www.iiasa.ac.atoptions ◼ summer 201716 The health initiative will strengthen links between IIASA research, the international global health research community, and policymakers. Researchers will collaborate across IIASA programs to promote interdisciplinary links involving health issues. Because the health research field is so large, IIASA will carefully identify its own niche aided by recognized scientists from around the world. Taking data from almost two million Austrian patients who had the same disease at around the same time, the team produced comorbidity networks with startling results. “We find that most diseases are dominated by genetic risk factors, not by a combination of genetic and environmental factors,” says Thurner. He believes this type of modeling provides a completely new way of looking at the health of a population. “If I can spot myself in this comorbidity network as my life goes on I can predict my (disease) trajectory pretty well.” An example is diabetes, a disease where patients are likely to have other complications such as kidney and retina problems. Knowing the patient’s position in the co-morbidity network can provide a promising start to predicting the expected complications and then rationally optimizing the combination of treatments and medications. The implications for interventions and public health programs are significant. “If policymakers know disease A causes disease B with a likelihood of 70%, and they know the costs associated with treating both A and B, they can compute the economic benefit of an intervention scheme.” Sustainable health IIASA has become deeply involved in integrated research supporting the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), particularly those “The essence of sustainable development is lasting improvement of human wellbeing.” Wolfgang Lutz IIASA makes the case for its global health initiative focused on climate, energy, and education. For IIASA World Population Program Director Wolfgang Lutz, health is not only a SDG in its own right but is intimately linked to many other SDGs. “The essence of sustainable development is improving human wellbeing,” he says, but stresses that the focus should be on “sustainable wellbeing” with health as a key dimension and perhaps the most important factor. With respect to health there is both good news and bad. The good news includes increases in life expectancy in most countries and progress in the reduction of some infectious diseases. The bad news includes increasing environmental and climate-related threats such as air and water pollution along with new infectious diseases to which the elderly are particularly vulnerable. IIASA research can really have a meaningful impact across many fields relevant to health, from air pollution to food and lifestyle; disease adaptation, transmission, and new pathogens; and health systems. Lutz says research on air pollution and its cumulative effect in the course of a lifetime is a perfect example of where IIASA programs should work together. “We know for sure that children in particular absorb this into their bodies but they don’t immediately become ill— that would only happen in cases of very severe pollution—so you need to consider the history of air pollution.” Lutz wants to see demographic life-cycle analysis combined with air pollution analysis, something very few people have done. “A perfect niche for IIASA,” he says. Another field where IIASA expertise can give powerful health-related insights is in food and nutrition. Internationally recognized research in land-use and food production modeling could be expanded to more Five areas have been identified where IIASA research could make a meaningful contribution to health research. 2Food, water, and undernutrition 3Lifestyle, unhealthy nutrition, and obesity in the context of aging 4 New dimensions of infectious disease spread: emerging pathogens, altered transmission, and disease adaptation 5Health systems and public health1Air pollution and its cumulative effects over the life cycle