U.S. Asian populations may have different risk profiles for common geriatric conditions like cognitive and physical decline

Newswise, July 10, 2017– U.S. Asian populations may have different risk profiles for common geriatric conditions like cognitive and physical decline. Researchers from the PINE study—the first ever longitudinal study of U.S. Chinese older adults in the greater Chicago area—found the cognitive and physical function of U.S. Chinese immigrants may be greatly impacted by their social and cultural context more than non-immigrant populations, according to three studies published in the special issue of the Journals of Gerontology: Medical Sciences.

Each of the three studies focused on different components of geriatric syndromes: physical function decline, cognitive decline, and the relationship between social support and cognitive function.

The PINE Study from Rush University Medical Center was initiated in 2011 with over 3,000 U.S. Chinese older adults, who were surveyed 2 years after their first interview.

The status of physical function and cognitive function was examined, and profiles of socio-demographic characteristics were collected at each visit. In total, these studies provide an in-depth understanding of U.S. Chinese older adults and their health and present the need for more in-depth studies into the health of U.S. Asian communities to further efforts toward health equity.

Contrary to existing research, the PINE Study showed mixed findings regarding the effect of socioeconomic status on functional decline over time.

 Researchers had previously theorized that lower education and income were risk factors for rapid functional decline, but the PINE Study showed that only lower education was associated with worse physical function, and these effects diminished over time. Income was not related to physical performance or rate of decline in age.

“Our findings showed the unique characteristics of Chinese older immigrants. For example, lower income is usually associated with faster rate of physical performance decline in other populations, but we did not find a significant relationship in the U.S. Chinese aging population,” said Dr. XinQi Dong, MD, MPH, professor of Rush University Medical Center, and the principal investigator of the PINE study.

“In our population, individual income may not fully capture an individual’s socioeconomic status. There is also significant socioeconomic variability within the category of Asian Americans, contrary to the Model Minority conception, which may obfuscate the association between socioeconomic status and physical function decline.”

These findings regarding the complexities of the U.S. Chinese population were reflected in a study regarding cognitive function trajectory among Chinese older adults. Dr. Lydia Li, PhD, Associate Professor at the School of Social Work, University of Michigan, found that the change of different cognitive abilities, which represent components of cognitive function, varies greatly between individuals. For example, more highly educated individuals have clear advantages in all types of cognitive abilities at baseline, they have more decline in episodic and global memory in two years.

Further, men performed better than women in most cognitive abilities at baseline but had faster rates of decline in working memory.

“The sex differences in baseline and the change of cognition over a two-year period may be explained by a recent study indicating that older women are more resilient than their male counterparts in cognitive decline. However, they found women to perform better in some cognitive domains at baseline, and that study was based on a sample of primarily White adults with higher level of education,” Li continued.

“It may be gender inequality in Chinese society that renders older women at disadvantages in cognitive testing.”

Building on the idea that Chinese culture and context may influence cognitive status in late life, the PINE Study researchers also found that social relationships, in the form of both more social support and more social strain, were associated with better cognitive function.

“We were surprised that social strain was positively associated with cognitive function. This is not common in other populations. Social support and social strain are important facets in older adults' social life,” said Shaoqing Ge, MPH, PhD candidate at Duke University School of Nursing.

The reason, Ge noted, may be culturally-based: “this finding may be the result of the unique appraisals among Chinese older adults. Reporting higher social strain may reflect a more socially engaged lifestyle.

Influenced by the traditional Chinese culture and norm, the U.S. Chinese older adults view their active engagement in the family as indications of self-value. Consequently, U.S. Chinese older adults may interpret social strain in a positive way.”

These articles are part of a special issue in the Journals of Gerontology: Medical Sciences to be fully released in July, 2017. Electronic version can be accessed through JGMS website.

For more information about the PINE study, please visit the PINE Study Wikipedia page or our website.

As America Ages, New National Poll Will Track Key Health Issues for Those Over 50

National Poll on Healthy Aging will release first results June 29

Newswise, June 29, 2017— Nearly a third of U.S. adults have celebrated their 50^th birthday – a sign of an aging nation. Now, a new poll based at the University of Michigan will take the pulse of this population on a wide range of health issues, and provide data and insights to inform healthcare policy, clinical practice, and future research. 

Later this month, the U-M Institute for Healthcare Policy and Innovation (IHPI) will release the first results from the National Poll on Healthy Aging (NPHA), with data on prescription drug use for people between the ages of 50 and 80.

Directed by IHPI and sponsored by AARP and Michigan Medicine, U-M’s academic medical center, the poll will issue new data 10 times a year focusing on key health-related issues facing older Americans.

IHPI’s poll team, led by Preeti Malani, M.D., will tap into the perspectives of older adults and their caregivers using a national sample. The overall goal of the poll is to inform the public, health care providers, policymakers, and aging advocates on issues related to health, health care and health policy.

“In medicine, sometimes we focus so much on the latest research findings that we lose the individual patient voice. Yet there are gaps in our understanding of health that cannot be filled with traditional medical research,” says Malani, a professor of internal medicine at the U-M Medical School who specializes in infectious disease and geriatric medicine.

“Some research studies can take years to complete. One of the most valuable aspects of this poll is that the results are available quickly and can provide timely insight into current issues.”

Adds Alison Bryant, AARP Senior Vice President of Research, “We know research drives insights that affect our ability to impact behavior change. Our hope is that these polls will provide new information that will ultimately help older Americans adopt and maintain healthy behaviors.”

The poll grew out of a strong interest in aging-related issues and policies among IHPI researchers, who include 510 members of the U-M faculty from a wide range of fields. The poll is modeled on U-M’s highly successful C.S. Mott Children’s Hospital National Poll on Children’s Health, which for 10 years has provided new data every month on issues facing children, teens and parents.

For more information about the poll methodology or to sign up for monthly emails, visit www.healthyagingpoll.org. Anyone interested in receiving the latest poll findings may join the NPHA mailing list. To learn more about IHPI, visit www.ihpi.umich.edu.

AARP is a nonprofit, nonpartisan, social welfare organization focused on a wide range of issues affecting older adults. Poll results will appear regularly in the AARP Bulletin, which goes to more than 22 million households, starting in the July-August issue. For more information, visit www.aarp.org.

Evidence Supports Benefits of Therapeutic Riding and Hippotherapy

The researchers reviewed and analyzed previous studies of horseback riding interventions for patients with various types of motor (movement) dysfunction—for example, cerebral palsy, multiple sclerosis, and stroke.

 A comprehensive review identified 16 studies evaluating two types of interventions: therapeutic riding, defined as some type of adaptive or modified horseback riding with a therapeutic goal; or hippotherapy, which uses the movement of the horse for therapeutic purposes.

Eight studies assessed the effects of equine-assisted therapies for children with cerebral palsy, including a total of 434 patients. Four studies evaluated the use of these interventions to improve mobility in older adults with multiple health problems and disabilities, 90 patients; and three studies addressed patients with multiple sclerosis, 52 patients. One study, including 20 patients, assessed the use of hippotherapy for patients after a stroke.

The results suggested that therapeutic riding or hippotherapy had a "significant positive impact" in all groups of patients studied. Individual studies reported small but significant improvements in outcomes such as balance, motor function, posture, gait, muscle symmetry, pelvic movement, psychosocial factors, and quality of life.

Eight studies provided sufficient data for pooled analysis (meta-analysis) of specific measures of balance and gross motor function. On a measure of balance, the effects of therapeutic riding were not significantly greater than for other types of therapy.

There was evidence of positive effects on several dimensions of gross motor function, but no statistically significant effect on the overall motor function score.

Mrs. Stergiou comments, "The evidence for therapeutic riding and hippotherapy is encouraging, but with gaps in that there are very few studies of these interventions in the international literature." She notes that the ability to perform meta-analysis is limited by the small size of the studies and the different measurements used.

Within these limitations, the available evidence suggests that therapeutic riding and hippotherapy can be beneficial for patients with neuromotor disabilities. 

The studies show improvement on measures of walking and gross motor function in children with cerebral palsy. The research also provides evidence of increased balance and leg muscle strength in older adults, including stroke survivors.

Further studies will be needed to examine how horseback riding interventions affect other important outcomes, such as daily activity levels and patient self-competence.

"Equine-assisted therapies potentially provide advantage for cognitive, emotional, and social well-being," Dr. Stergiou and coauthors write. "Individuals who participate have the opportunity to simultaneously experience, benefit and enjoy the outdoors, which might not otherwise be readily available."

Click here to read "Therapeutic Effects of Horseback Riding Interventions: A Systematic Review and Meta-analysis."

Article: "Therapeutic Effects of Horseback Riding Interventions: A Systematic Review and Meta-analysis." (doi: 10.1097/PHM.0000000000000726)

Mindfulness Shows Promise as We Age, but Study Results Are Mixed

Scientists still searching for best approaches in older adults

Newswise, March 9, 2017 – As mindfulness practices rise in popularity and evidence of their worth continues to accumulate, those who work with aging populations are looking to use the techniques to boost cognitive, emotional and physiological health.

But studies so far have shown mixed results in the elderly, and more investigation is needed to determine exactly how best to apply mindfulness in that population, a new review of the research to date has found.

A majority of the 27 studies in the review suggest that the focused attention at the core of mindfulness benefits older people, but others don’t point to improvements.

And that should prompt more rigorous investigations in search of interventions likely to do the most good, researchers from The Ohio State University found. Their analysis appears in the journal Frontiers in Aging Neuroscience.

“Mindfulness is a practice that really serves as a way to foster a greater quality of life and there’s been some thought that it could help with cognitive decline as we age,” said Stephanie Fountain-Zaragoza, lead author of the study and a graduate student in psychology.

“Given the growing interest in mindfulness in general, we wanted to determine what we know right now so that researchers can think about where we go from here,” she said.

The good news so far: The evidence from a variety of studies points to some benefits for older adults, suggesting that mindfulness training might be integrated into senior centers and group homes, the researchers found.

Older people are an especially important population to study given diminished social support, physical limitations and changes in cognitive health, the researchers point out.

Studies of mindfulness meditation usually involve three types of practices. The first, focused attention, involves sustained attention to a single thing (such as the breath) and an effort to disengage from other distractions.

Open monitoring meditation, often seen as the next step up in mindfulness, includes acknowledging the details of multiple phenomena (sensations, sounds, etc.) without selectively focusing on one of them.

“This includes being open to experiencing thoughts and sensations and emotions and taking them as they come and letting them go,” Fountain-Zaragoza said.

Loving-kindness meditation encourages a universal state of love and compassion toward oneself and others.

“The goal with this is to foster compassionate acceptance,” said senior author Ruchika Shaurya Prakash, director of Ohio State’s clinical neuroscience laboratory and an expert in mindfulness.

In addition to looking at how mindfulness contributed – or did not – to behavioral and cognitive functioning and to psychological wellbeing, some of the research also looked at its potential role in inflammation, which contributes to a variety of diseases.

In all categories of study, including inflammatory processes, Prakash and Fountain-Zaragoza found mixed results.

The hope is that mindfulness could help the elderly preserve attention and capitalize on emotional regulation strategies that naturally improve as we age, Prakash said.

“Around 50 percent of our lives, our minds are wandering and research from Harvard University has shown that the more your mind wanders, the less happy you are,” she said.

“Mindfulness allows you to become aware of that chaotic mind-wandering and provides a safe space to just breathe.”

In older people, mindfulness ideally has the potential to help with cognition, emotion and inflammation, but little research has been done so far and those studies that have been done have had mixed results and scientific limitations.

While most of the studies in the review showed positive results, the field is limited and would benefit greatly from larger randomized controlled trials, Fountain-Zaragoza said.

“We want to really be able to say that we have strong evidence that mindfulness is driving the changes we see,” she said.

Sociology Professor Addresses Caregiving Burden From Personal Perspective

Newswise, February 2, 2017— It’s not every day a researcher draws from their own experiences as the basis for a published study but that’s exactly what Miles Taylor, associate professor of sociology at Florida State University, has done in her latest paper addressing what she calls the structural burden of caregiving.

The study, “The Structural Burden of Caregiving: Shared Challenges in the United States and Canada,” published in the January edition of The Gerontologist, examines the caregiving stress associated with navigating the health care system in the United States and the social care system in Canada.

A call for papers from The Gerontologist prompted Taylor and her colleague Amélie Quesnel-Vallée, sociology professor at McGill University in Quebec, to consider their own experiences caring for aging parents and to see if those experiences exposed gaps in aging literature.

For Taylor and Quesnel-Vallée, the most noticeable void lay in the area of emphasis and quantifiable data on the amount of time caregivers spend negotiating treatment and services for their care recipients.

“Research up until now has really defined caregiving burden in terms of the amount of time and stress it takes to actually provide care to another person — helping with daily tasks and how especially difficult it can be when they need help with things that are very personal, like bathing,” Taylor said.

Taylor said previous models of caregiving burden have done a good job of notating interpersonal stresses, such as strained relationships and the demands in the caregiver’s life.

But what about the time spent negotiating health care systems, getting the care, getting treatments, figuring out when treatments will be covered and under which circumstances? That part of the caregiving burden, Taylor and Quesnel-Vallée say, isn’t well-articulated or measured.

It was 2010 when Taylor began caring for her grandmother, her only living parent, off and on for about 5 years. That was about the same time Quesnel-Vallée began caring for her mother in Canada. The two found their caregiving trajectories and experiences lined up so much, they decided to put their experiences in this paper.

Although they knew providing the direct care would be difficult, they were not prepared for how much time and stress they would spend trying to understand, negotiate and manage medical and related care for their loved ones. They contrasted the two care settings. Ultimately, they concluded that Canada offers more services for older adults and there is more transparency about what is and what is not covered.

However, there were some common themes among the Canadian and American systems. In both systems the researchers found that a great deal of time was spent negotiating and managing care and services but the burden often went unrecognized. They also found in their experience as caregivers that the systems were characterized by discontinuous and fragmented care.

The final common theme researchers noted was the gross potential for inequity for both the caregivers and care recipients.

“We kept telling each other over the course of the past six years, if we felt like this was so difficult and if we had such a hard time, how in the world would other folks begin to deal with this? It must be so much more burdensome,” Taylor said.

Taylor and Quesnel-Vallée felt their education, income and even their race gave them more social currency and health care literacy to help them gain information and access services.

The pair want the paper to not only inform health care professionals and policymakers about the aforementioned issues with the two care systems, but also the caregivers themselves.

“We hope caregivers will understand this part of caregiving, the stress involved in managing care and negotiating services, constitutes caregiving time and stress,” Taylor said. “Often, we felt it wasn’t counted in terms of how much time is spent caring for someone else.”

Through their testimony, Taylor and Quesnel-Vallée also hope other scholars will move forward and try to measure this time and stress related to managing care better. Right now, most surveys only question how much time caregivers take feeding or bathing their care recipient or providing other daily tasks such as taking out the trash.

“I think that now we should increasingly ask how much time and stress did you spend negotiating with medical care, and Medicare, and trying to figure out which services were available and when,” Taylor said.

Taylor says a number of people are experiencing the structural burden of caregiving even though it’s not clearly in the literature yet. They hope caregiving theory can broaden and consider this structural burden, especially considering advanced medical practices are causing people to live longer.

“There was a very recent caregiving report that said over half of caregivers are actually engaged in these kinds of tasks, yet we don’t quantify that,” Taylor said. “We don’t say how much time is this taking up? So that’s what we’re hoping to do, shed more light on it — and I think when you give something a name and a clear theme and definition — that’s when you can get the ball rolling to help people to talk about it more.”

No Excuses: Real Reason You’re Late May Vary with Age

Young and old use different strategies to estimate passage of time, study finds

 

Newswise, January 16, 2017--A song is just a song, but as time goes by, something as random as a song’s length could be the difference in whether you miss an important deadline or arrive late for an appointment, suggests time-management research from Washington University in St. Louis.

The study, published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, shows that people rely heavily on time estimates of past experiences to plan for future tasks and that outside influences, such as background music, can skew our perception of time, causing even the best-laid plans to go awry.

“Our results suggest time estimates of tasks that we need to incorporate into our later plans, like a drive to an appointment, are often based on our memory of how long it took us to perform that same drive previously,” said Emily Waldum, principal author of the paper and a postdoctoral researcher in psychological and brain sciences in Arts & Sciences.

“Even if you think you estimated the duration of events accurately, external factors unrelated to that event can bias time estimates,” she said.

“Something as simple as the number of songs you heard play on your phone during a run can influence whether you over- or under-estimate the duration of the run.”

In a complicated modern world where multitasking is the norm, it’s easy for our game plans to fall apart due to breakdowns in “prospective memory,” a term psychologists use to describe the process of remembering to do something in the future.

Waldum and co-author Mark McDaniel, a professor of psychological and brain sciences, designed this study to tease out differences in how people young and old approach a challenge that requires them to plan ahead and complete a series of time-based tasks by a specific deadline.

The research included 36 college undergraduates and 34 healthy older adults in their 60s, 70s and 80s. It aimed to simulate the complicated time-based prospective memory (TBPM) challenges that people old and young experience in everyday life.

In the first part of the study, participants were asked to keep track of how long it took to complete a trivia quiz. The quiz always ran 11 minutes, but participants had to make their own time estimates without access to a clock. Some completed the quiz with no background noise, while others heard either two long songs or four short songs.

Later, the participants were challenged to put together as many pieces of a puzzle as possible while leaving enough time to complete the same quiz before a 20-minute deadline.

Contrary to previous research, this study found that seniors managed to complete future tasks on time at about the same rate as college undergraduates, although each age group used surprisingly different strategies to estimate how much time they would need to repeat the quiz and finish the next phase of the experiment on deadline.

Older adults reported ignoring songs heard in the background, relying instead on an internal clock to estimate how long it took them to complete the first quiz. 

Consistent with other research on internal clocks and time perception,  seniors in this experiment tended to underestimate time taken on the first quiz. This led them to spend a little too much time on the puzzle and to finish the second quiz a bit beyond deadline.

“When younger adults heard two long songs during the first quiz, they performed a lot like older adults, underestimating the quiz duration and winding up a bit late,” Waldum said.

“When they heard four short songs, younger adults overestimated how much time they would need to repeat the quiz leading them to finish it too early.”

Thus, older adults performed about the same, regardless of whether they heard songs or not. For young people though, background music played a big role in whether they were too early or too late, Waldum said.

While the challenges of being on time may remain largely the same throughout a lifetime, this study suggests that the tricks we use to stay on schedule may evolve as we age.

For college students with young, agile minds and no fear of multitasking, using songs to estimate the passage of time may be a plausible approach when no clock is available.

“In a scenario where the duration of a background event is set, such as a 30-minute television show, this is a very good strategy because it provides useful duration information whether you’re paying attention to the show or not,” Waldum said.

“However, when background events are less predictable, as in the case with songs and many other events, basing a time estimate on them can be risky.”

Older adults, who generally see declines in memory and the speed at which they process information, tended to avoid multitasking throughout the study.

During the first quiz, they ignored songs and relied more on an internal clock to make time estimates. In the second phase of the study when a clock was made available, they were less likely to pause working on the puzzle and quiz to check the clock.

These findings suggest that older adults may actually over-rely on their internal clocks that give us a feeling of elapsed time. Checking a clock when it is available is a much better strategy than relying on a feeling of elapsed time, and indeed increased clock-checking predicts better time-based prospective memory performance in this and many other previous studies.

Therefore, even if checking the clock requires some multitasking, it is worth your time, Waldum said.

No matter what challenges the future brings — getting out the door and to work, finishing walking the dog before the cookies are done or purchasing popcorn before a movie starts — the fundamentals of being on time still apply.

You must remember this: Success requires making accurate estimates of the time needed to complete prerequisite tasks, remembering to carry out these tasks at the appropriate time and avoiding distractions that could prevent you from staying on schedule.

“Our study provides some good news for older adults,” Waldum said. “Our results, while preliminary, suggest that time-management ability and the ability to perform some types of complex time-based tasks in real life may largely be preserved with age.”

Centenarians Can Still Improve Fitness Levels, Study Finds

Fit after 100: Training Helps French Bicyclist Beat His Own World Record at 103

Newswise — January 14, 2017—Adults over 100 years old can still increase their athletic performance and physical fitness with regular training, researchers have found. 

The case study of Robert Marchand, the now 105-year-old who recently broke the 100+ cycling record—again—is published ahead of print in the Journal of Applied Physiology.

French researchers followed the cycling training routine of Marchand, a retired gardener and wine dealer who was born in 1911. Marchand cycled regularly between the ages of 15 and 25 but stopped cycling during his working years before starting again at age 70.

For the two years before he attempted a world record for cycling in the 100 and over age group, Marchard cycled more than 3,000 miles each year (5,000 km).

The research team administered exercise tests before and after this two-year training period to measure his cardiovascular fitness, including exertion rate, breathing rate and maximum oxygen consumption. Body weight and muscle mass was also assessed.

Marchand set a world record for cycling 14 miles (24.25 km) in one hour at the age of 101 and broke his own record at age 103, completing 16 miles (26.92 km) in the same time frame.

In the two-year span between these records, his revolution-per-minute (rpm) rate increased from 69 to 90. Maximal oxygen consumption (VO2max) also increased over the two-year period.

“Indeed, his VO2max was in the same range as those of a sedentary 50-year-old man or those of an active 65-year-old man and an endurance trained 80-year-old man,” the researchers wrote.

“This study shows for the first time that it is still possible to improve performance after one’s 100th birthday by using polarizing training monitored with [rate of perceived exertion] and by focusing on a high pedaling cadence.”

Read the full article, “Case Studies in Physiology: Maximal Oxygen Consumption and Performance in a Centenarian Cyclist,” published ahead of print in the Journal of Applied Physiology.

 .

Physiology is the study of how molecules, cells, tissues and organs function in health and disease. Established in 1887, the American Physiological Society (APS) was the first U.S. society in the biomedical sciences field. The Society represents more than 11,000 members and publishes 14 peer-reviewed journals with a worldwide readership.

Are We More Risk Averse as We Get Older? It’s a Gray (Matter )

Newswise, December 26, 2016 — Age itself is not the determining factor in how an individual views or tolerates risk when making decisions; instead, it is the age-related decline in the volume of gray matter in our brains, research by NYU’s Institute for the Interdisciplinary Study of Decision Making shows.

“These results provide a basis for understanding the neural mechanisms involved in risky choices and offer a glimpse into the dynamics that affect decision-making in an aging population,” explains study co-author Paul Glimcher, a professor at NYU’s Center for Neural Science and director of the Interdisciplinary Study of Decision Making (IISDM).

“This research can help us improve how we communicate with the elderly about complex issues that may present risks to them.”

“Older adults need to make many important financial and medical decisions, often under high levels of uncertainty,” adds lead author Ifat Levy, an associate professor of comparative medicine and of neuroscience at Yale University and visiting professor at IISDM.

“We know that decision making changes with age, but we don’t really know what the biological basis of these changes is. In this paper, we make the first step towards answering this question, by showing that the decrease in gray matter volume in a particular part of the brain – posterior parietal cortex – accounts for the increase in risk aversion observed with age."

The study, which appears in the journal Nature Communications, focused on the right posterior parietal cortex (rPPC)—a part of the brain involved in planning movements, spatial reasoning, and attention.

For the study, the research team presented a series of choices to 52 study participants, aged 18 to 88 years. Participants could either receive $5 or take their chances with a lottery of varying amounts and probabilities.

For example, a participant could choose the certain gain of $5 or opt for a 25 percent chance of getting $20. The researchers also measured the gray matter volume in the posterior parietal cortex of each subject, drawn from MRI scans.

After analyzing the risk choices and MRI measurements, the researchers confirmed that age-related decline in risk tolerance correlates more with changes in brain anatomy than with age.

The study’s other authors were: Michael Grubb, an NYU postdoctoral fellow at the time of the study and now an assistant professor at Trinity College in Connecticut; Agnieszka Tymula, a senior lecturer at the University of Sydney; and Sharon Gilaie-Dotan, a postdoctoral fellow at University College London.

The research was supported by grants from the National Institutes of Health (R01 5R01AG033406, R21AG049293); the DOI for this paper will be 10.1038/NCOMMS13822.

ADVANCEMENTS IN AGING RESEARCH TARGET MULTIPLE AGE-RELATED DISEASES

Newswise, August 22, 2016– The University of Alabama at Birmingham, along other members of the Geroscience Network, has published six manuscripts that map strategies for taking new drugs that target processes underlying aging into clinical trials.

Researchers believe these agents hold promise for treating multiple age-related diseases and disabilities. The articles appear today in The Journals of Gerontology: Series A – Biological Sciences and Medical Sciences.

The Geroscience Network, formed by Steven Austad, Ph.D., distinguished professor and chair ofUAB’s Department of Biology in the College of Arts and Sciences; James Kirkland, M.D., Ph.D., director of the Mayo Clinic Robert and Arlene Kogod Center on Aging; and Nir Barzilai, M.D., Albert Einstein College of Medicine, consists of 18 academic aging centers, along with the participation of more than 100 investigators from across the United States and Europe. The network is funded by the National Institutes of Health.

“Aging is not just an abstract and intriguing biological problem,” Austad said.

“It is the No. 1 cause of death and disability in today’s world. Its threat is very significant, because aging is a major risk factor in a host of other serious diseases and health issues.

The Geroscience Network seeks to combine research from a number of institutions to address this ever-growing challenge.”

“Aging is the largest risk factor for most chronic diseases, including stroke, heart disease, cancer, dementias, osteoporosis, arthritis, diabetes, metabolic syndrome, blindness and frailty,” Kirkland said.

“Recent research suggests that aging may actually be a modifiable risk factor. The goal of our network’s collaborative efforts is to accelerate the pace of discovery in developing interventions to delay, prevent or treat these conditions as a group, instead of one at a time.”

Austad is the senior author on the manuscript “Evaluating Health Span in Preclinical Models of Aging and Disease: Guidelines, Challenges, and Opportunities for Geroscience,” which assesses how research animals can be best employed to guide the development of therapies that counteract aging processes.

Kirkland is senior author on manuscripts that explore the challenges of developing aging interventions:
•“Barriers to the Preclinical Development of Therapeutics That Target Aging Mechanisms”
•“Frameworks for Proof-of-Concept Clinical Trials of Interventions That Target Fundamental Aging Processes”

The first manuscript summarizes discussions held at a 2014 Geroscience Network retreat.

While research efforts have successfully identified new drugs that extend lifespan in animals, the authors discuss the need to develop a consistent preclinical pipeline for drug development that focuses on best practices for drug discovery, development of lead compounds, translational preclinical biomarkers, funding and support for preclinical studies, and integration between researchers and clinicians.

In the second manuscript, the researchers acknowledge that aging therapies may hold “great promise” for enhancing the health of a wide population, with clinical trials’ being a critical step for translating therapies from animals into humans.

The manuscript is built on the outcomes of an international meeting funded through the National Institutes of Health R24 Geroscience Network.

The other manuscripts published are:
•“Strategies and Challenges in Clinical Trials Targeting Human Aging”
•“Resilience in Aging Mice”
•“Moving Geroscience Into Uncharted Waters”

Felipe Sierra, Ph.D., of the National Institute on Aging and a member of the Geroscience Network, describes the potential impact of aging discoveries in his manuscript, “Moving Geroscience Into Uncharted Waters.”

Sierra said, “In addition to the direct health issues, it has been calculated that care for the elderly currently accounts for 43 percent of the total health care spending in the U.S., or approximately $1 trillion a year, and this number is expected to rise as baby boomers reach retirement age.

“Reducing these costs is critical for the survival of society as we know it, and a 2013 paper by Dana Goldman and colleagues calculated that a modest increase in lifespan and health span (2.2 years) could reduce those expenses by $7 trillion by 2050.”

“While significant work has already been accomplished, there is much more to be done as we focus on translating findings into practice,” Kirkland said.

“The Geroscience Network is a collaborative way to overcome barriers and move us closer to our shared goal of increasing health span — the healthy, independent years of life for the elderly.”

In addition to UAB, members of the Geroscience Network are Albert Einstein College of Medicine, Buck Institute for Research on Aging, Harvard University, the Mayo Clinic, Johns Hopkins University, National Institute on Aging, the Scripps Research Institute, Stanford University, the University of Arkansas, the University of Connecticut, the University of Michigan, the University of Minnesota, the University of Oklahoma, the University of Texas Health Science Center San Antonio, the University of Southern California, the University of Washington and Wake Forest University, as well as members from other institutions across the U.S. and Europe.

This work was supported by the National Institutes of Health, the Paul Glenn Foundation, Nathan Shock Centers of Excellence for the Biology of Aging, the Connor Group, and the Noaber and Ted Nash foundations. Additional acknowledgements include the contributions of the basic researchers and clinicians engaged in research on mechanisms of aging and care of the elderly in the five retreats supported by the R24 grant from the National Institute on Aging, as well as a workshop on resilience and aging supported by the National Institute on Aging.

About UAB
Known for its innovative and interdisciplinary approach to education at both the graduate and undergraduate levels, the University of Alabama at Birmingham is an internationally renowned research university and academic medical center and the state of Alabama’s largest employer, with some 23,000 employees and an economic impact exceeding $5 billion annually on the state. The five pillars of UAB’s mission include education, research, patient care, community service and economic development. UAB: Knowledge that will change your world. Learn more at www.uab.edu.