A fundamental understanding of the physiological changes that occur with age has always been essential to the practice of medicine. Now, advanced technologies combined with a greater emphasis on translational research are providing deeper and richer insights into the aging process.
At Yale School of Medicine, researchers are investigating everything from the molecular mechanisms of aging to novel therapeutics that may help forestall the damaging effects of age. To learn more about the strides being made and the newest areas of scientific inquiry, Yale Medicine Magazine spoke with Nancy J. Brown, MD, the Jean and David W. Wallace Dean of Yale School of Medicine and C.N.H. Long Professor of Internal Medicine.
What lessons can be learned from the ways in which aging has been studied in the past?
In the past, we associated aging with disease. Today, while we know that aging is one of the biggest risk factors for chronic diseases like Alzheimer’s, cancer, and heart disease, we understand that disease is not necessarily a normal part of aging. So we are beginning to focus on healthy aging and how we can intervene in the aging processes to promote healthy aging.
How is research into the aging process now evolving?
It’s evolving in that we now differentiate what we refer to as chronological aging, or simply how many years somebody has lived, from biological aging, and the age-related function of a person’s cells, tissues, and organs. That means we are working to identify the markers of aging in the cells and in the human body that can give us that information.
What is the most significant recent discovery related to the physiology of aging? Something that is not a single discovery but has evolved over time is the understanding of the relationship between obesity and calorie intake on energy metabolism, inflammation, and therefore biological aging.
What are the most promising areas of aging research being conducted at Yale School of Medicine?
There are many. In addition to the Claude D. Pepper Older Americans Independence Center, which we’ve had for many years, we now have the Yale Center for Research on Aging (Y-Age). We are creating longitudinal biorepositories of tissue so we can identify biomarkers associated with biological aging. There’s research underway that focuses on rodents that live for a long time to understand what metabolites they have that are associated with slower biological aging. We have work ongoing related to energy expenditure in a cell and how that process can cause damage and promote aging—and, importantly, how we might intervene to slow that process. We also have work ongoing that slows organ damage when tissues are exposed to inflammation and changes in energy metabolism, as might occur when there’s a lack of blood supply. We’re now working to bring these activities together into a single research collaboration.
What is your hope for the aging research that is underway at Yale School of Medicine?
We have big hopes. We’re working to bring together all of our researchers working on aging to make the whole bigger than the sum of the parts. We’re in conversations with donors about that, and we’re very excited about the vision.
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