CRITICAL POSITIONS IN AGEING RESEARCH European silver paper on the future of health promotion and preventive actions, basic research, and clinical aspects of age-related disease

Ageing of populations is one of the highest achievements of humankind, and Europe is leading this successful story. However, ageing and age-related disease is also a mounting challenge for individuals, for health care systems and for biological, psychosocial, epidemiological, medical and public health sciences. Many scientists from every single area of knowledge and science are actively working to better understand ageing and tackle the challenges that it brings to twenty-first century individuals. These challenges cannot be confronted from a single point of view. A coordinated, active, united front of many disciplines is needed to face them, and a strategy that, starting from basic research, reaches every single aspect of ageing is needed. This means that translational research is a fundamental requirement, and that advances coming from research should flow rapidly, through the education of professionals, to the promotion of healthy lifestyles, and to health and social care meeting the