Project aims to shine light onto ageing

THEY may hope to have property and other possessions to pass on but a group of Ireland’s over-50s have already left possibly their most valuable legacy in a test tube.

More than 8,000 people who agreed to take part in a groundbreaking study of the lives of the country’s older people have also donated blood samples for use in medical research for the next 20 years.

The collection, from volunteers in The Irish Longitudinal Study on Ageing (TILDA), is a potentially priceless databank of information for scientists who rarely get such a large pool of samples to study or check new discoveries against.