NIH’s Geroscience Summit Returns: Register Now!

By CEO James Appleby, BSPharm, MPH

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) Geroscience Interest Group and the National Institute on Aging are currently welcoming registrants for their Fourth Geroscience Summit, with the theme “Geroscience for the Next Generation.”

This will be a hybrid event April 24 to 26. The in-person activities will take place on the NIH campus in Bethesda, Maryland. GSA served as a partner on the first geroscience summit in 2013, and it’s great to see it thrive a decade later. As the organizers say, “geroscience is a rapidly growing field of research through which scientists aim to develop interventions that may slow down or stop the functional decline and reduce the burden of disease that often take place with aging.”

The summit objectives are to:

• Underscore that advances in geroscience are meant for all people, setting this discipline in the contexts of precision medicine, minority health, and health disparities
• Emphasize the need for geroscience research to address comorbidities, multimorbidities, and geriatric syndromes (i.e., multiple long-term health conditions commonly seen in older adults)
• Explore further development of measures designed to assess health and function in aging (as alternatives to “years since birth” as the independent variable in geroscience research)
• Consider the importance and utility of mathematical modeling of aging
• Discuss feasibility, design, and implementation of geroscience clinical trials
• Examine the importance of evidence-based inclusive geroscience in medical practice

In anticipation of the summit, the editors-in-chief of The Journals of Gerontology, Series A: Biological Sciences and Medical Sciences and senior National Institute on Aging leaders have published an editorial, “Geroscience for the Next Chapter of Medicine.” (It’s co-authored by Gustavo Duque, PhD, FGSA, Lewis Lipsitz, MD, FGSA, Luigi Ferrucci, MD, PhD, Siobhan Addie, PhD, Stacy Carrington-Lawrence, PhD, and Ronald Kohanski, PhD.) In it, they share that the journal’s current Translational Section will be transformed into a permanent Translational Geroscience Section.