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_outlineJohn Tower is a professor of biology and gerontology. He spoke to us about his research on the roles of sex differences and mitochondria in aging.
Highlights from our conversation:
As you may know, in humans, women live longer than men. And the reason for that is not entirely understood and also malfunction of the mitochondria, which is also called the powerhouse of the cell is, directly implicated in aging and multiple aging-related diseases, including Parkinson's disease and Alzheimer's disease and cancer. And so we'd like to understand at a very basic level, why does the mitochondria malfunction during aging and does this, or does this not have, uh, is this related to, or a result of sexual differentiation of the male and female?
While there's no consensus in the aging field on pretty much anything. But, I would say at this point, antagonistic pleiotropy is the most favored model for how the genetics of aging works across species. And the idea is that genes can be beneficial in one context, but detrimental in another context. Specifically they're likely to be beneficial early in life, promoting things like differentiation and growth and sexual reproduction and in the long term, the same genes are detrimental and have a cost during aging.
I've made a complete about face, from thinking that sexual differentiation was not important, to thinking that well, maybe sexual differentiation is actually causative to a large part in the aging process. In other words, in differentiating the male and the female, you set up the situation for sex specific trade-offs between reproduction and aging, and some aspects of these trade-offs are common between the male and the female. And some of them are unique to either the male or the female in that there are pathways that promote a reproduction, but then have a cost for the long-term maintenance of the animal. That's the kind of antagonistic pleiotropy my lab is focusing on right now which is the idea that a gene can be beneficial to one sex, but detrimental to the other, or a gene could be detrimental to each sex in different ways
Across species, we see a decrease in mitochondrial gene expression and mitochondrial gene function during aging and the relevance to sex is that the mitochondria is transmitted to offspring only through the mother. And so this means natural selection can only optimize mitochondrial gene function for the female. This means that the male inherits a mitochondria that is less optimal for his physiology than, than it might be. And so what we see is that mitochondria isolated from female mammal tissues function better than mitochondria isolated from males consistent with this hypothesis. And so this may be one reason why females tend to live longer than males
I think what I would expect is we're going to see sex-specific interventions in aging and aging-related diseases, even diseases common to the male and the female, like Parkinson's and Alzheimer's, that having an intervention that's tailored, to the male or the female will be more efficacious.