Life at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine
“Why would you want to study that?” This is a question I have received when I share that I research the genetics of frailty — a rather abstract health trait that seeks to describe the increased susceptibility to disease and deterioration of health as individuals age. As an abstract concept, frailty can be hard to […]
As a third-year medical student in my mid-20s, there are many privileges associated with youth that I take for granted. In the winter of 2021, however, I elected to spend several weeks pursuing a rotation in geriatric psychiatry. I spent hours talking to older patients — in clinic, over the phone, in the inpatient unit […]
What does healthy aging mean? Why do so many search for longevity? A medical student reflects on geriatrics and age-related diseases.
Osteoarthritis (OA) is not only the most common chronic condition of the joints, but also the most common type of arthritis, affecting approximately 27 million Americans.1 The prevalence of OA increases with age,2 and elderly patients experience swelling, pain and decreased mobility. Currently, there is no cure for this degenerative joint disease, and the only […]
We’re getting old. Unprecedented advances in biomedical research and technology over the last century have increased the average human lifespan in the United States by over 50 percent.1 And with more people enrolling in Medicare than prenatal partner yoga, it is vital to understand and improve the health of the aging population. Unfortunately, getting older […]
The famed Spanish conquistador Juan Ponce de Leon once traveled to the New World in search of the mythical Fountain of Youth. Hundreds of years later, we are still fascinated by youth and aging. Though not on a quest for a source of youth, scientists today are seeking to learn about the aging process in […]
An interdisciplinary team of scientists from the Lieber Institute and Johns Hopkins has discovered more than 50,000 regions of the genome that show different levels of activity in the brain across six stages of human development. Their report1, published online on Dec. 15 in Nature Neuroscience, highlights the complexity of genes associated with brain growth […]