A new national focus on health ageing

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UK SPINE welcomes the recent announcement of 11 new networks, across 28 UK universities, aimed at transforming UK ageing research. The £2m investment by UKRI recognises the need to address the discrepancy between improvements in lifespan, and the number of those additional years that are lived healthily.

Through their combined forces, the BBSRC and MRC are seeking to address the previously fragmented nature of ageing research and recognise the importance of an interdisciplinary approach to deliver a better understanding of the biological mechanisms of ageing.

With the clear complementarities between the mission of UK SPINE and the UK Ageing Network (UKAN), we look forward to strengthening and building relationships with these networks to build a movement for healthy ageing.

Each of the networks facilitates the development of new research approaches to the challenges and opportunities of our ageing population:

  • AGENTS: Ageing and Nutrient Sensing Network will take a multiscale approach from human population studies through to molecular mechanisms, to investigate the role nutrient sensing plays in the ageing process
  • ATTAIN: aims to develop effective and attainable physical activity for older communities living with health inequalities and to improve policy around healthspan and quality of life in old age
  • BLAST (Building Links in Ageing Science and Translation): aims to develop new knowledge and interventions to improve the health of older people, with a scientific focus on biomarkers and biological mechanisms of ageing
  • CARINA: aims to advance and integrate understanding of the factors influencing ageing-dependent changes in the immune system of older adults
  • CELLO (CELLular metabolism Over a life-course in socioeconomically disadvantaged populations): aims to understand the changes in cellular metabolism throughout the life course in order to identify ways to address health inequalities on ageing.
  • CFIN: will addresses the challenge of age-related cognitive frailty and related reduced healthspan, by harnessing knowledge of lifespan biological, health, environmental and psychosocial mechanisms of cognitive frailty to develop integrated interventions
  • ECMage: Extracellular Matrix (ECM) ageing across the life course aims to understand how ageing alters the ECM of specific organ/tissue systems, how age-associated ECM impacts tissue-specific deterioration and the roles of specific cell sub-types involved, in order to develop new interventions
  • Food4Years (Food for added life years): aims to develop, integrate and communicate research on healthy diets to support health, wellbeing, independence, and quality of life in older adults
  • MyAge (muscle resilience across the life course: from cells to society) aims to develop new insights into muscle health and an understanding of the pathways leading to muscle ageing
  • Skin Microbiome in Health Ageing (SMiHA): will explore how changes in the skin microbiome reflect healthy ageing and to map research addressing the challenge of healthy ageing by understanding and targeting the skin microbiome
  • The Ageing Research Translation (ART) of Health Ageing Network: aims to build capacity, knowledge and resources for effective translation of advances in ageing biology and epidemiology into interventions for human testing

With Professor Lynne Cox, a UK SPINE project lead at the University of Oxford, and Professor Richard Faragher, at the University of Brighton, coordinating the networks to further increase collaboration, there will also be important synchronisation at a macro-level.