The first report, “Children’s Health, The Nation’s Wealth,” recommends adopting a new definition for children’s health that moves away from an emphasis on infectious disease toward a new focus on chronic conditions such as obesity, diabetes and asthma. The report’s authors say researchers should redouble their efforts to collect data on children and chronic disease as it relates to childhood development, long-term health consequences and health disparities. They point in particular to gaps in the data on the healthy development of children between their toddler and adolescent years.

The report also suggests establishing a special HHS children’s unit that would coordinate relevant research among government agencies and encourage state and local health data collection programs.

At the other end of the age spectrum, researchers would like to learn more about how social and behavioral differences, as well as a legacy of discrimination, influence the health of the nation’s elderly racial and ethnic minorities. The second report, “Understanding Racial and Ethnic Differences in Health in Late Life,” lays out a research agenda to address these issues. As with children, the report’s authors stress the importance of following health across the lifespan and collecting more information on the conditions that affect certain populations disproportionately.

The report’s authors say elder health researchers need to be more careful about separating morbidity and mortality statistics for different racial and ethnic populations and make stronger efforts to find out how stress and discrimination influence health and health behaviors. At the moment, most of the research on the health effects of discrimination focuses on differences between black and white patients, with little information about how Hispanic and Asian populations react to such stress.

To read the new reports, go here (children’s health) and here (elder health).