Einstein Center Population Diversity (ECPD) – Pathways into Multimorbidity

Objective 4 of the Einstein Center Population Diversity (ECPD) – Unfolding unequal life courses within diverse families in aging societies.

The ECPD is a multi- and transdisciplinary research endeavour. The research is carried out by a consortium of seven partners in Berlin, including the WZB, that will study the consequences of increasing population diversity for social inequality and health disparities by focusing on the growing diversity of families, including changing conceptions and boundaries of the family itself.

Objective 4 aims to capture and understand mutual feedback effects between physical and mental disease and longitudinal pathways of multimorbidity emergence in changing family systems. Major goals of Objective 4 are to elucidate the biopsychosocial pathways underlying multimorbidity dynamics, especially related to short- and longer-term consequences of depression and cardiometabolic risk factors and disorders. The Objective will also investigate how pre-disorder pathways of risk and resilience are shaped by interactions between genetic susceptibility and the physical, social, and family environment.

Research Questions:

- What are the social, biological, and biosocial pathways underlying the interrelatedness of mental and physical disease and multimorbidity

- How do changing family systems contribute to and protect against adverse disease trajectories?

Einstein Center Population Diversity: https://einstein-diversity.com/research/