Although populations around the world are rapidly ageing, evidence that increasing longevity is being accompanied by an extended period of good health is scarce. A coherent and focused public health response that spans multiple sectors and stakeholders is urgently needed. To guide this global response, WHO has released the first World report on ageing and health, reviewing current knowledge and gaps and providing a public health framework for action. The report is built around a redefinition of healthy ageing that centres on the notion of functional ability: the combination of the intrinsic capacity of the individual, relevant environmental characteristics, and the interactions between the individual and these characteristics. This Health Policy highlights key findings and recommendations from the report.

Exploratory graph analysis (EGA) is a new technique that was recently proposed within the framework of network psychometrics to estimate the number of factors underlying multivariate data. Unlike other methods, EGA produces a visual guide-network plot-that not only indicates the number of dimensions to retain, but also which items cluster together and their level of association. Although previous studies have found EGA to be superior to traditional methods, they are limited in the conditions considered. These issues are here addressed through an extensive simulation study that incorporates a wide range of plausible structures that may be found in practice, including continuous and dichotomous data, and unidimensional and multidimensional structures. Additionally, two new EGA techniques are presented, one that extends EGA to also deal with unidimensional structures, and the other based on the triangulated maximally filtered graph approach (EGAtmfg). Both EGA techniques are compared with five widely used factor analytic techniques. Overall, EGA and EGAtmfg are found to perform as well as the most accurate traditional method, parallel analysis, and to produce the best large-sample properties of all the methods evaluated. To facilitate the use and application of EGA, we present a straightforward R tutorial on how to apply and interpret EGA, using scores from a well-known psychological instrument: the Marlowe-Crowne Social Desirability Scale.

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A search (precision value 94%, recall value 93%) of the ISI Web of Science database (1992-2001) revealed that mental health publications accounted for 3-4% of the health literature. A 10/90 divide in internationally accessible mental health literature was evident and remained undiminished through 10 years as low- and middle-income countries (n=152) contributed only 6%, high-income countries (n=54) 94%, and 14 leading high-income countries (with more than 1% contribution for majority of years under consideration) contributed 90% of internationally accessible mental health research. Steps should be taken to improve the research infrastructure and capacity to conduct and disseminate mental health research in general, and on a priority basis in low- and middle-income countries.

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Each of these areas warrant in depth analysis and synthesis, whereas this article presents an overview for further consideration and action.

Piroska Östlin and colleagues argue that a paradigm shift is needed to keep the focus on health equity within the social determinants of health research agenda.