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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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,...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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_outlineSean Curran, the Associate Dean of Research at the USC Leonard Davis School and an Associate Professor of Gerontology and Molecular and Computational Biology, joins Professor Geroge Shannon in a conversation about his research toward generating blueprints that can allow an individual to maximize health over the course of their lifespan. Informed by genetics, he is developing the capacity to predict which diets are ideal for a healthy life and which should be avoided.
Sean Curran quotes from this episode:
On the effect genetic makeup has with fad diets
“I think everybody knows somebody who's done a fad diet that had amazing results. And then similarly either tried that diet themselves or knows someone who did the exact same diet, only to find it didn't work at all. I would argue that those two diets or those two ways of changing what you eat probably had the same effect overall. But the reason that the results were different was because of the genetic makeup of the individual. So I think this is a new way of thinking about personalized medicine but taking it from a personalized diet standpoint, where rather than prescribing a one size fits all diet, looking at the genetic makeup of an individual and then one day being able to prescribe to them— here are the types of food that you should avoid and here are the types of food that you should increase consumption of on a daily basis.”
On the past research of diets and genetics for aging
“So I don't think anyone would argue that both diets and genetics play important roles in how our cells metabolize things and, and how healthy we are and how long we're gonna live. But in the past, the studies that had been done usually look at one specific mutation and in the context of one individual diet. So these are all traditional classical genetic studies. But what we found is actually that diet has a much more powerful role over the lifespan than we originally thought. We've actually found conditions where a diet can be used to mask a genetic mutation.”
On his research of worm’s diets
“A lot of studies have shown that worms can actually make a choice to pick one diet versus the other. But I think it's interesting what hasn't really been studied yet is whether or not worms make that decision based on the information that's given to them. Is this diet actually better for them? Is it nutritionally more readily available for them or does it just smell and taste better to them?”
On why food is hard to study with regard to aging
“So I would argue food is probably one of the most variable aspects of any individual's life compounded across differences and food that you made over the lifespan. Food and diet is integrated into our society on multiple levels. It's deeply rooted in what your personal tastes are. It's rooted in what your economic status is, what you have the availability to, to actually purchase in the market as well as cultural and family influences as well. So because of this, I think a lot of the research early on focused on changing sort of large factors in diet, particularly studies that either changed the amount of food that you're going to eat or when you were given access to the food.”
On how ‘yoyo’ dieting can be hard to keep up
“I think there's a lot of aspects of diet that make changing behavior complicated. One, the thought of depriving yourself of something, whether you really want it or not, I think perhaps has a psychological effect on a lot of people. I also believe that a lot of changes that you'll have to your diet work in the first couple of weeks. So I think the existence of what people think of as yoyo dieting is because when you exert a massive change on what your normal behavior is, your body is trying to adapt to this new and different types of nutrients that you're giving it. Because of that, you probably lose a little bit of weight in the first couple of weeks. After that, your body is used to using the types of nutrients, the types of foods, the amount of calories that you're giving it. It is adapted to the new diet you have.”