Mammalian aging can be delayed with genetic, dietary and pharmacologic approaches. Given that the elderly population is dramatically increasing and that aging is the greatest risk factor for a majority of chronic diseases driving both morbidity and mortality, it is critical to expand Geroscience research directed at extending human healthspan.

The global population of individuals over the age of 65 is growing at an unprecedented rate and is expected to reach 1.6 billion by 2050. Most older individuals are affected by multiple chronic diseases, leading to complex drug treatments and increased risk of physical and cognitive disability. Improving or preserving the health and quality of life of these individuals is challenging due to a lack of well‐established clinical guidelines. Physicians are often forced to engage in cycles of “trial and error” that are centered on palliative treatment of symptoms rather than the root cause, often resulting in dubious outcomes. Recently, geroscience challenged this view, proposing that the underlying biological mechanisms of aging are central to the global increase in susceptibility to disease and disability that occurs with aging. In fact, strong correlations have recently been revealed between health dimensions and phenotypes that are typical of aging, especially with autophagy, mitochondrial function, cellular senescence, and DNA methylation. Current research focuses on measuring the pace of aging to identify individuals who are “aging faster” to test and develop interventions that could prevent or delay the progression of multimorbidity and disability with aging. Understanding how the underlying biological mechanisms of aging connect to and impact longitudinal changes in health trajectories offers a unique opportunity to identify resilience mechanisms, their dynamic changes, and their impact on stress responses. Harnessing how to evoke and control resilience mechanisms in individuals with successful aging could lead to writing a new chapter in human medicine.

Abstract:The National Institutes of Health (NIH) Geroscience Interest Group (GSIG) sponsored workshop, The Role of Inflammation in Age-Related Disease, was held September 6th-7th, 2012 in Bethesda, MD. It is now recognized that a mild pro-inflammatory state is correlated with the major degenerative diseases of the elderly. The focus of the workshop was to better understand the origins and consequences of this low level chronic inflammation in order to design appropriate interventional studies aimed at improving healthspan. Four sessions explored the intrinsic, environmental exposures and immune pathways by which chronic inflammation are generated, sustained, and lead to age-associated diseases. At the conclusion of the workshop recommendations to accelerate progress toward understanding the mechanistic bases of chronic disease were identified.www.impactaging.com

Background/Objectives: Resilience, the ability to resist or recover from adverse effects of a stressor, is of widespread interest in social, psychologic, biologic, and medical research and particularly salient as the capacity to respond to stressors becomes diminished with aging. To date, research on human resilience responses to and factors influencing these responses has been limited. Methods: The National Institute on Aging convened a workshop in August 2015 on needs for research to improve measures to predict and assess resilience in human aging. Effects of aging-related factors in impairing homeostatic responses were developed from examples illustrating multiple determinants of clinical resilience outcomes. Research directions were identified by workshop participants. Results: Research needs identified included expanded uses of clinical data and specimens in predicting or assessing resilience, and contributions from epidemiological studies in identifying long-term predictors. Better measures, including simulation tests, are needed to assess resilience and its determinants. Mechanistic studies should include exploration of influences of biologic aging processes on human resiliencies. Important resource and infrastructure needs include consensus phenotype definitions of specific resiliencies, capacity to link epidemiological and clinical resilience data, sensor technology to capture responses to stressors, better laboratory animal models of human resiliencies, and new analytic methods to understand the effects of multiple determinants of stress responses. Conclusions: Extending the focus of care and research to improving the capacity to respond to stressors could benefit older adults in promoting a healthier life span.

Population aging is unprecedented, without parallel in human history, and the 21st century will witness even more rapid aging than did the century just past. Improvements in public health and medicine are having a profound effect on population demographics worldwide. By 2017, there will be more people over the age of 65 than under age 5, and by 2050, two billion of the estimated nine billion people on Earth will be older than 60 (http://unfpa.org/ageingreport/). Although we can reasonably expect to live longer today than past generations did, the age-related disease burden we will have to confront has not changed. With the proportion of older people among the global population being now higher than at any time in history and still expanding, maintaining health into old age (or healthspan) has become a new and urgent frontier for modern medicine. Geroscience is a cross-disciplinary field focused on understanding the relationships between the processes of aging and age-related chronic diseases. On October 30-31, 2013, the trans-National Institutes of Health GeroScience Interest Group hosted a Summit to promote collaborations between the aging and chronic disease research communities with the goal of developing innovative strategies to improve healthspan and reduce the burden of chronic disease.

Age is by far the major risk factor for most chronic diseases. This has been common knowledge since time immemorial. Aging encompasses the biological changes most often seen as declines of function and increasing burden of disease. The close linkage of these two has led people to believe that aging, like age, is immutable. It is only recently that research into the basic molecular and cellular mechanisms of aging has led to potential interventions that increase lifespan and appear to increase healthspan, as well. Geroscience is an interdisciplinary field that aims to understand the relationship between the biology of aging and the biology of age-related diseases. The Bgeroscience hypothesisp osits that manipulation of aging will delay (in parallel) the appearance or severity of many chronic diseases because these diseases share the same underlying major risk factor (age). The hope is that this will lead to health improvements in the older population with perhaps greater efficiency than can be achieved through the successful cure and management of diseases of aging as they arise individually or as comorbidities.With those concepts in mind, the Geroscience Interest Group (GSIG) was launched as a trans-institute interest group within the NIH in November 2012. Here, we discuss the genesis of the trans-NIH group and the most salient activities that have occurred in the last 5 years.

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