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Danan Gu

ing, such as self-prioritized importance of economic conditions, family support, or longev-
ity gene in determining successful aging (Phelan, Anderson, Lacroix et al, 2004; Matsu-
bayashi, Ishine, Wada et al., 2006), we only used subjective measures that are closely re-
lated to psychological well-being or the quality of life that are available in the CLHLS.
Future research should include more psychological and social factors in classifying con-
cordance and discordance of OSA and SSA. Secondly, we only constructed four subtypes
for the variable of concordance and discordance of OSA and SSA based on two dicho-
tomous variables. Although it provided more information on successful aging than OSA or
SSA alone, this classification is very crude, and mainly exploratory. A more sophisticated
classification is needed to further identify or distinguish different groups of older people in
clinical or community settings to prioritize patient-specific care and services. In the mean-
time, there is still a long way to adequately incorporate the notion of successful aging
classification in public healthcare systems to monitor and manage population health
beyond specific diseases and conditions.
Despite the limitations discussed above, our findings underscore the bio-psychosocial
model of successful aging that identifies subtypes that appear to represent distinct groups
with regard to concordance and discordance between objective and subjective measures of
successful aging. We believe that the use and further exploration of joint classification of
objectively and subjectively measured successful aging could help to better understand
mortality risk-differentiated groups of successful aging, both objectively and subjectively.

Conflict of Interest and Funding
No conflict of interest has been reported by the author. The author also wishes to make a
disclaimer that the views expressed in this paper are solely those of his own and do not
reflect those of the United Nations.
Acknowledgements

This article is based on a publicly available dataset derived from an ongoing project of the
Chinese Longitudinal Healthy Longevity Survey (CLHLS). The CLHLS is supported by
R01 AG023627-01 (Yi Zeng, principal investigator) awarded to Duke University. The
CLHLS is also supported by the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), the China
Natural Science Foundation, the China Social Sciences Foundation, the Hong Kong Re-
search Grants Council, and the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, which
provided support for international training. Thanks also go to two anonymous reviewers
and Professor Bernardo Lanza Queiroz, Professor Jesscia Sautter, and Professor Melanie S.
Brasher for their helpful comments.
Ethics Statement

Ethics approval was obtained from the Institutional Review Board at Duke University
Medical Center, the Division of Social Sciences, Peking University, and the National Bu-
reau of Statistics of China.
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International Journal of Population Studies | 2015, Volume 1, Issue 1 39