Improving the health and well-being of family caregivers
Lessons in Lifespan Health
Francesca Falzarano is an assistant professor of gerontology at the USC Leonard Davis School. Her research is inspired by her personal experience as a caregiver to her parents and explores how to improve the mental health and well-being of family caregivers, including through the use of technology. On young caregivers “I think right now it's estimated that five and a half million individuals are under the age of 18 are caring for a parent or some family member with chronic illness, mental health issues, dementia-related illnesses, and other age-related impairments. So, this is something...
info_outline
Aging among Black Americans
Lessons in Lifespan Health
Lauren Brown is an assistant professor at the USC Leonard Davis School. Her research uses publicly available data to uncover the unique difficulties Black Americans face in maintaining physical and psychological well-being as they age. Her lab both challenges the methods used to study older Black adults and strives to increase diversity in data science research with the goal of increasing the visibility of Black and Brown people via data and storytelling. Quotes from the episode On the role of racism in biomedical and statistical sciences and disease prediction If you think about the...
info_outline
Using dance to ease Parkinson’s symptoms
Lessons in Lifespan Health
Patrick Corbin is an associate professor of practice at the USC Gloria Kaufman School and an internationally renowned dance artist whose career has spanned over 30 years and bridged the worlds of classical ballet, modern and contemporary dance. He recently spoke to us about his work, exploring the positive effects that dance can have on neurology. On movement and movement therapy Well, on a neurological level movement is cognition. Movement stimulates cognition. So that's sort of the sciencey part. The other part is that dance is a multifaceted, multilingual way of movement, and...
info_outline
The effects of exercise on the brain
Lessons in Lifespan Health
Connie Cortes is an assistant professor of gerontology at the USC Leonard Davis School. Her work straddles the fields of neuroscience and exercise medicine, and she recently spoke to us about her research seeking to understand what is behind the beneficial effects of exercise on the brain with the goal of developing what she calls “exercise in a pill” therapies for cognitive decline associated with aging and neurodegenerative diseases. On brain plasticity and brain aging Brain plasticity we define as the ability of the brain to adapt to new conditions. And this can be mean...
info_outline
Tips for healthy aging
Lessons in Lifespan Health
and instructional associate professor of gerontology at the USC Leonard Davis School, and a specialist in geriatric medicine, joins us for a conversation about healthy aging, including tips on how to keep the body and mind functioning for as long as possible. Quotes from this episode On the importance of setting small goals "People may have all the good intentions, but they might set up goals that are too ambitious and then when they don't reach that goal, they feel frustrated, and they quit… We have to let them understand that goals must be small…So, an apple a day. We have to eat the...
info_outline
Cellular balance across the lifespan
Lessons in Lifespan Health
Dion Dickman, associate professor of neuroscience and gerontology, joins George Shannon to discuss how the nervous system processes and stabilizes the transfer of information in healthy brains, aging brains and after injury or disease. Quotes from the episode: On synaptic plasticity: “Synapses are essential, fundamental units of nervous system function and plasticity is this remarkable ability to change. And throughout early development into maturation and even into old age, synapses just have this amazing resilience to change and adapt to different situations and injury disease,...
info_outline
A balancing act: homestasis under stress
Lessons in Lifespan Health
is a Distinguished Professor of gerontology, molecular and computational biology, and biochemistry and molecular medicine at USC. Over the course of his career, he has played a central role in defining the pathways and mechanisms by which the body is able to maintain balance under stress and in uncovering the role aging plays in disrupting this balancing act. He recently joined Professor George Shannon to discuss his research on how the body is able to maintain balance under stress and the implications it could have for preventing age-related disease and decline. Quotes from this...
info_outline
Improving health outcomes and quality of life
Lessons in Lifespan Health
is the Mary Pickford Chair in Gerontology and director of the at the USC Leonard Davis School. She's also the co-director of the National Center on Elder Abuse, which is housed at the Keck School of Medicine of USC. She recently spoke to George Shannon about her research, including her work exploring ways to provide long-term care services and supports that allow older adults to be as independent as possible and the challenges and opportunities that technology provides in this area. Quotes from this episode On building on lessons learned during the pandemic “I think a lot of what we saw...
info_outline
Stem cell biology and aging
Lessons in Lifespan Health
Rong Lu is an associate professor of stem cell biology and regenerative medicine, biomedical engineering, medicine, and gerontology at USC. She joins George Shannon to discuss her research into the complex and surprising behavior of individual blood stem cells and what it could mean for treating diseases associated with aging. Quotes from this episode On stem cells and what makes them so promising for medical research Stem cells are the special cells in the body that can produce other type of cells. So in particular there are two type of stem cells, one called embryonic stem cells that only...
info_outline
The intersection between stress and aging
Lessons in Lifespan Health
Assistant Professor of Gerontology joins Professor George Shannon to discuss their research seeking to understand why stress response pathways break down as we grow older and whether there may be ways to delay that breakdown and potentially promote healthier lifespans. Quotes from this episode On the definition of stress: Stress can come in so many different forms and flavors. It can come in the form of something external, something like heat stress. For example, being out in the desert heat, it can be something as similar to cold stress of a winter storm, or even something like...
info_outlineMara Mather, Professor of Gerontology and Psychology at the USC Leonard Davis School of Gerontology, is shedding light on how we learn, what we remember, and where we might find clues to slowing the progression of Alzheimer's disease.
Quotes from this episode:
"What is it that you remember? The things that you remember are typically the things that were really emotional in your life that mattered to you, that were surprising, that stood out. And we also can notice ourselves how much we tend to have gaps in some of these memories. And so scientists have been interested in this for a very long time."
"We looked at a sample of several hundred adults and we found among the older adults that the integrity of the locus coeruleus or this brightness that it shows on our MRI images because of its magnetic properties – as that declines with age, it seems that the locus coeruleus is probably showing some neuronal loss. And we found that that signal was associated with how well people did on memory tests. So people who showed what looked like a more intact locus coeruleus were doing better on memory tests."
"It turns out the locus coeruleus is a really fascinating area to look at in aging because it is the first place that Alzheimer's pathology is seen. And what I mean there is when you hear about Alzheimer's disease, you hear about plaques and tangles and the plaques are amyloid beta pathology and the tangles are related to tau pathology and tau pathology starts in the brain quite a bit earlier than the amyloid."
"I think that Alzheimer's is more like cardiovascular disease. It's a spectrum and we're all somewhere on this spectrum. We all have a little bit of the disease pathology the way that we probably all have some atherosclerosis lurking somewhere in our cardiovascular system. What this means is that, Alzheimer’s is this very slow-moving process and what we really want to be doing is slowing it down."
"That high arousal state is helping you to learn new things and shape your brain and keep your brain plastic as you get older or throughout life. But those high energy, high metabolic brain plasticity processes are creating waste, they're producing things like amyloid and tau. So you've got these positive aspects that leads to brain plasticity, but it also can lead to more pathology."
"You need both the high arousal, sympathetic nervous system, properties that allow for brain plasticity. And you also need these relaxation, parasympathetic properties that allow for things to be repaired and for waste to be cleared out. And you need to go through both of those states every day pretty much to maintain a healthy balance of both really high performance and dealing with the consequences of having had all that brain activity."
"And so my hope and my ambition is to try to figure out the balance where you can engage the brain in intense mental stimulation that leads to growth and neuroplasticity. And we can also figure out optimal ways to either restore deep sleep and enhance that or do these sort of meditative or heart rate variability, biofeedback sort of practices that can mimic some of the aspects of deep sleep and allow for the clearance of the waste products of that really high mental stimulation."
"One study that looked at a large sample of people who have practiced meditation for many years versus people who have not practiced meditation found that when they just used a machine learning technique to guess at how old the brains were of each person. This algorithm guessed that on average, the meditators brains were 7.5 years younger than their actual age and compared to the control brains, which were non-meditators and didn't show that effect. So it seems that meditation is associated with benefits for the actual brain health, which is really interesting, whether this might be because over years, they've had better clearance of these potentially pathological aspects that when they accumulate for many years eventually lead to Alzheimer's disease."
Learn more about Professor Mara Mather and her work at https://gero.usc.edu/faculty/mather/