| Title: | Innovative quantifications of biological aging and their applications |
| Lead Institution: | Université de Sherbrooke |
| Principal investigator: | Professor Alan Cohen |
Application 65070
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About
We know that older adults suffer at higher rates from chronic diseases such as diabetes. What if, rather than treating all the chronic diseases one at a time, we could instead tweak the aging process itself to protect us against all of them simultaneously? This is the vision of the emerging field of Geroscience. Age also appears to be the main risk factor for complications and death from COVID-19. But, although it is clear that the inflammatory system plays a crucial role, it is currently difficult to explain the wide variation of COVID-19 clinical manifestations, ranging from asymptomatic cases to respiratory complications such as pneumonia, and even death. In fact, scientists still do not agree on what the aging process is, or how to measure it, despite decades of research on the subject. This makes it hard to know if proposed interventions are working. We have developed creative new approaches to measure the aging process, using sophisticated statistical models integrated with complex systems theory to measure how our internal systems lose equilibrium during the aging process. The indices we create are then highly predictive of future changes in health state: physical and cognitive decline, disease, even death. At the same time, as we improve our ability to measure aging, we also improve our ability to understand it. Going forward, we are starting to apply some of the methods we have developed, by using data on nutrition to see how diet affects the aging process, and develop recommendations, for instance. The impacts of this research are far reaching, from concrete, personalized dietary recommendations on how people can slow their aging process, to theoretical advances in how we understand the aging process. Also, in the short to medium-term, our project may bring answers to questions related to the greater susceptibility of older adults to COVID-19, answers that will undoubtedly be useful for the management of the current pandemic, as well as future ones.1 Publication
| Pub ID | Title | Author(s) | Year | Journal |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 10503 | Physiological Dysregulation Proceeds and Predicts Health Outcomes Similarly in Chinese and Western Populations | Qing Li (+8) | 2023 | The Journals of Gerontology Series A |
Enabling scientific discoveries that improve human health