""""""""A Transdisciplinary Approach to Engage Specialty Investigators in Aging Research,"""""""" will address the pressing need to develop research priorities and new investigators to address critical health care issues facing the nation's rapidly growing population of older adults. The Association of Subspecialty Professors (ASP) has previously held five similar conferences (on topics such as HIV and aging and acute kidney failure in elderly patients) and aims to extend this series with NIH funding supplemented and leveraged by private foundation support from the John A. Hartford Foundation.
Under Aim 1, ASP will hold three research agenda setting meetings from 2012 through 2014 in the areas of solid organ transplantation in elderly patients, diabetes mellitus (DM) and cardiovascular (CV) complications in seniors, and wound healing and tissue regeneration in older adults. Each conference will also address the disparities in healthcare among ethnic and racial minorities in these areas. Planning committees and participants for each meeting will include senior and junior faculty in a wide variety of disciplines (e.g. internal medicine, surgery neurology, nursing, and interventional radiology), and representatives of relevant professional organizations as well as appropriate NIH Institutes and Centers. This diverse group will ensure that the conferences serve to bridge disciplines, fill bench-to-bedside gaps in knowledge, and inject key concepts in aging research including senescence, quality of life measures, and frailty into fields generally void of such considerations. Using the meetings outlined in Aim 1 as a vehicle, ASP will build on this work in Aim 2, to focus more broadly on raising the profile of geriatrics and gerontology in key disciplines by engaging with vital researchers in each specialty as well as rising junior faculty """"""""stars"""""""" in the specialty.
In Aim 3, ASP will focus on stimulating research application and fostering career development by engaging NIH IC contacts outside of NIA, publishing the conference proceedings in high impact specialty journals, and training junior scientists in the conduct of aging research through specific development strategies at each meeting.
The Association of Subspecialty Professors'project, A Transdisciplinary Approach to Engage Specialty Investigators in Aging Research, focuses on improving the health care of America's rapidly aging population. The project will develop roadmaps to guide future research in three conditions disproportionately affecting elderly patients: organ transplantation;cardiovascular complications of diabetes;and would care and tissue regeneration. The project will also address how to overcome the health care disparities racial and ethnic minority populations confront in these areas. To provide a long-term platform for improving care, the project will stimulate continuing education programming and prepare junior researchers to enter life-long careers in studying aging and its interplay with chronic diseases.
