SAVA

The Study of Aging and Vision in America (SAVA) focuses on providing up-to-date estimates of the number of older adults in the U.S. with vision impairment and blindness, as well as key insights on the associations between vision impairment and blindness, contextual factors, and late-life outcomes like dementia, long-term care placement, and mortality. This study employs newly collected vision data from the NIH-funded National Health and Aging Trends Study (NHATS) to conduct longitudinal analyses that are nationally representative of older adults aged ≥65 in the U.S.

Principal Investigator: Joshua Ehrlich

This work is supported by a grant from the National Eye Institute (R01EY034479).

• Huang AY, Ehrlich JR, Hamedani AG. Visual impairment, age-related eye disease, and sleep dysfunction in older adults. Eye (Lond). 2025 Apr. doi: /10.1038/s41433-025-03777-3. PMID: 40221561

• Nagarajan N, Leziak K, Zhou Y, Mumby R, Hu M, Ferrante LE, De Lott LB, Rein D, Ehrlich JR. Associations between visual impairment and recurrent hospitalizations in older US Adults. J Am Geriatr Soc. 2025 Mar. doi: 10.1111/jgs.19308. PMC11907751

• Ehrlich JR. Untreated Vision Loss as a Modifiable Dementia Risk Factor. JAMA Ophthalmol. 2024 Sep 19. doi: 10.1001/jamaophthalmol.2024.3991. PMID: 39298154 

• Smith JR, Huang AR, Zhou Y, Varadaraj V, Swenor BK, Whitson HE, Reed NS, Deal JA, Ehrlich JR. Vision Impairment and the Population Attributable Fraction of Dementia in Older Adults. JAMA Ophthalmol. 2024 Oct 1. doi: 10.1001/jamaophthalmol.2024.3131 PMID: 39235822

• Jin H, Zhou Y, Stagg BC, Ehrlich JR.  Association between vision impairment and increased prevalence of falls in older US adults. J Am Geriatr Soc.  2024 May.  doi: 10.1111/jgs.18879. PMC11090722

• Statistical Code on Open Science Framework (OSF)

  • doi: 10.17605/OSF.IO/5R2TP