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Oct 10

Professor Bérénice Benayoun: Advancing new models for aging research

By Lifespan Health, Podcast, Research

Bérénice Benayoun, Assistant Professor of Gerontology at the USC Leonard Davis School of Gerontology, is advancing what we know about how cells age, and how they can possibly be returned to a more youthful state, by focusing on areas that have historically been overlooked.

Quotes from this episode

The reason it’s so powerful is because we can recapitulate most of what you expect from aging in that short amount of time, including cognitive decline, increased amount of cancers, decreased fertility and all of that.

And, it’s not that they’re dying of like something random. They are dying of aging. When we look at all the signs, they have all the signs of aging, which means we can recapitulate an entire human lifespan in less than six months. And so, that’s very attractive to study aging — diseases of aging — as a model.

One of the problems is they can integrate themselves in genes that are important for cell health, including tumor suppressor genes. And so, when they go everywhere, they’re going to create that increasing mutational load, and they can actually drive tumor genesis, right, by turning off the safeguards against uncontrolled cell proliferation. That’s one thing. The other thing is, they look exactly like viruses as far as our immune system is concerned. They used to be viruses. And so, when our immune system sees a transposon being expressed, it actually activates and tries to kill it.

Maybe, part of the problem with aging is we have sort of an autoimmune response against those viruses, and we know that sustained immune response — which is, you know, this inflammatory response — is actually very bad for us.

At least in immune cell types, aging creates many more changes in female cells than in male cells. That could explain a lot of the differences in immune diseases. Young women are much more subject to autoimmune diseases, like lupus. It’s a frequency of nine to one for women to men, but that decreases after menopause, right? So again, there’s a huge interplay between hormones and immunity and immune cell types. We see that aging creates many more changes in females than in males.

Most people actually just study males, and we know very little about differential mechanisms, and not just with aging, it’s across fields. All of these people usually just study males, whether human or mouse because it’s simpler.

We’re studying aspects of immunity, and we’re actually saying that the immune response is vastly different depending on where those mice are in their hormonal cycle. And so, you know, yes, the data, it looks noisy, but if you’re actually stratifying it by the hormonal status, it’s not more noisy, and it gives you more information.

Learn more about Professor Bérénice Benayoun and her work at https://gero.usc.edu/faculty/berenice-benayoun-phd

Jul 24

Professor Dana Goldman: Investing in health

By Lifespan Health, Podcast

Dana Goldman, USC Distinguished Professor in public policy, pharmacy, and economics and director of the Schaeffer Center for Health Policy & Economics at the USC Price School of Public Policy, is working to improve health – and reduce spending – by calling for policy changes that reward prevention, innovation and long-term investments in people of all ages.

Quotes from this episode

“I’m a little concerned that in the current debate, we tend to focus mainly on costs and insurance. And the questions around aging are much broader and more dynamic than the current policy debate gives it attention.”

“There’s a very good drug, for example, that’s under development … it reduces cancer, reduces cardiovascular disease, may be protective for all Alzheimer’s, helps with diabetes. And that drug is called exercise. And we’ve done a lot of research on it, and we know it’s very good, but there’s no incentive for anyone in our healthcare system to take older people for a walk. And yet, we know that would be extremely valuable.”

“If I develop a pill, I have a patent system that gives me some protection. And if I take the risk to figure out some way to get this to patients, I know that someone can’t copy it until my patent has expired. And that has encouraged the development of a lot of pills. But if I come up with a way to get you to walk or eat better or something like that, it’s very easy for someone to copy that. And so you can see that the playing field is tilted more towards treatment and less away from prevention just because of the way we think about intellectual property.”

“Historically, the way we’ve paid for health care is we paid dollars for volume of services. So you have an office visit, you get paid. And the system has responded by giving us lots of volume of healthcare services. But that’s not actually what people want. I mean, they aren’t looking to go to the doctor every week. What we really want as a society is good health.”

“We need to pay for health, not health care. And if we do that, then we’ll be able to accumulate some savings out of the system that I think would help pay for all the other types of infrastructure investments that would make sure that people lead wholesome, long, productive lives.”

Learn more about Professor Goldman and his work at https://priceschool.usc.edu/people/dana-goldman/.

Jun 19

Professor Christian Pike: Sex differences in Alzheimer’s disease

By Alzheimer's and Dementia, Lifespan Health, Podcast, Research

Christian Pike, Professor of Gerontology at the USC Leonard Davis School of Gerontology, discusses his research on sex differences in Alzheimer’s disease and how they can help inform how we might one day prevent and treat it.

 Quotes from this episode

“… Maybe there are situations where the disease, although it’s the same disease, it works a little bit different in men than it does women. And maybe we should consider that in terms of the risk factors for developing it and even how we approach it therapeutically.”

“If you look at clinical trials of Alzheimer’s disease drugs, almost all of them are failed.”

“You can’t control your genetics. At least you can’t yet. But you can control your environment and your lifestyle what we call modifiable risk factors. And so what everybody can do is deal with those now. while we’re, while we’re waiting to get the treatments.”

“There are so many differences between men and women in Alzheimer’s disease. I mean, at the core of it, the disease is very much the same across all people. But then when you begin to break it down into the effects of different risk factors, you begin to see significant differences.”

“And in recent years there’s been a greater emphasis on sex differences in the more we look, the more differences between the male brain and the female brain that we find.”

Learn more about Professor Pike and his work at https://gero.usc.edu/faculty/pike/

May 29

Dean Laura Mosqueda: Addressing elder abuse in the U.S.

By Elder Abuse, Lifespan Health, Podcast

Dr. Laura Mosqueda, Dean and Professor at the Keck School of Medicine of USC, is raising awareness about the issue of elder abuse and shaping how it is addressed in medical schools, clinics and the national conversation.

 Quotes from this episode

“Whenever an older adult comes into an emergency room or a primary care office with some sort of injury or wound, we almost always can find a reason other than abuse or neglect that it happens. So, we don’t want to overcall it and over-accuse people, but we need to be aware that it’s a possibility.”

“Well, I think one of the important things as a primary care physician is that we do take a holistic approach to things, so that sometimes I joke around with my patients and I say, well, your cardiologist’s job is to pay attention to your heart, and my job is to make sure that we remember the heart is attached to the rest of you, and how are we going to take care of your heart in the context of you. And then, even as importantly, in the context of your family and your social situation.”

“There’s remarkable work being done to help caregivers and this idea of caregiver stress, it’s so important for caregivers who are under stress to recognize that within themselves, to not feel embarrassed or ashamed, and to reach out and accept help, which is very hard for a lot of us to do.”

“One of my big jokes is nobody has ever thanked me for preventing their fall. If you go into oncology, it’s a very heroic sort of specialty, and cardio thoracic surgery is very heroic. Geriatrics is not what you think of when you think of a heroic specialty. So it just doesn’t have the same kind of oomph and excitement that other specialties do. But once you get in there, and you do some house calls, and you meet people who are 90 or 100 years old and hear their stories. For me, that’s very inspiring.”

Learn more about Dean Mosqueda and her work at keck.usc.edu/faculty-search/laura-mosqueda/

May 01

Professor Caleb Finch: Aging, genes and the environment

By Environment, Lifespan Health, Podcast, Research

USC University Professor Caleb Finch is working to understand the relationships between aging, genes and the environment through his studies of ancient mummies and premodern societies.

Quotes from this episode

On how people in ancient times may have had heart disease, currently the world’s leading cause of death

“The oldest individual may be the Tyrolean iceman, Ötzi, as he’s called, who is… 3000 BC, living in the Copper Age. And, both of his carotid arteries were calcified. He died because of a wound from a weapon. But, I think it’s a conclusion that’s fairly robust. Is that they’re, at least in the last 10,000 years in the Neolithic area era, people have had some level of atherosclerosis. Although, it may not have been a major cause of death or disability.”

On the paradox of how the Tsimane population lives with high levels of inflammation but low levels of heart disease, even at older ages

“So, what has turned out to my cardiologist’s surprise, when they actually started imaging the older Tsimane that they have almost no vascular disease, and stroke and heart attack are very rare causes of death. They’re mostly…death is caused by infections, or associated with infections. And, it’s a wonderful mystery as to how the rate of blood vessel aging is so much slower in this population than in North America and Western Europe. So we’re studying this in terms of diet, in terms of stress, in terms of disease load, and, of course, we are looking at their individual genetics. … And, that’s why the Tsimane project is so fascinating because they have lifelong high inflammation, and we all would have predicted and did that they would have had faster aging for these same diseases. But it’s not the case, at least for that heart disease.”

On the surprises that come with scientific research

“So, that’s one of the great pleasures in science. As you put your best thoughts together and let them be challenged, looking at different varieties of lifestyle and it turns up that there are things that seem paradoxical that give deeper insights into basic mechanisms of aging.”

Learn more about Professor Finch and his work at gero.usc.edu/faculty/finch

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