Nature Medicine Article on Weight Loss Drugs

Nature Medicine has this interesting piece which answers common questions about the new weight loss weight loss drugs- GLP-1 receptor agonists.  A sample from the article:

Sex differences

Early evidence suggests that GLP-1RAs produce different effects on women and men. “It is important to look for and understand sex differences, especially when it comes to metabolically targeted therapies, because we have long known there are fundamental sex differences in metabolic physiology,” says Susan Cheng, director of population health sciences at the Smidt Heart Institute at Cedars–Sinai in Los Angeles, California. “In effect, if the metabolic substrate differs, then we can expect that the response to a metabolically targeted therapeutic will likely differ in some way even if there are many similarities.”

As with all drugs that might benefit large populations of patients, Cheng says, “we should make efforts to understand sex differences in their on- and off-target effects.” As an example, she mentions statins, which “clearly benefit both sexes, but there is a statistically significant differential effect that is documented yet not widely recognized and, thus, not well understood.”

With GLP-1RAs, “we already know from early data that women tend to experience more off-target effects than men, such as gastrointestinal side effects that are often severe enough to preclude therapeutic use,” Cheng says. “There [are] also data suggesting that women who can tolerate GLP-1 receptor agonist therapy may lose more weight, at least in the short term,” which suggests that women might be more sensitive than men to GLP-1RAs. Nonetheless, Cheng notes that sex differences in, for example, cardiac benefits have not been seen. “So, there is more work to be done to understand the potential differences as well as similarities,” Cheng says.

Cheers,

Colin

 

JAGS image of the month (Thompson quote)

 

The image from my JAGS commentary is featured on the cover of the December issue as the image of the month.   Full access to the article and abstract video is here.

Cheers, 

Colin

Biology Letters Article (now out)

My latest publication entitled "Climate geroscience: the case for ‘wisdom-inquiry’ science" is now published in the Royal Society's Biology Letters. The abstract:

Why should, and how can, the fields of climate science and geroscience (which studies the biology of ageing) facilitate the cross-disciplinary collaboration needed to ensure that human and planetary health are both promoted in the future of an older, and warmer, world? Appealing to the ideal of ‘wisdom-oriented’ science (Maxwell 1984 In From knowledge to wisdom: a revolution in the aims and methods of science), where scientists consider themselves to be artisans working for the public good, a number of the real-world epistemic constraints on the scientific enterprise are identified. These include communicative frames that stoke intergenerational conflict (rather than solidarity) and treat the ends of planetary and human health as independent ‘sacred values’ (Tetlock 2003 Trends Cogn. Sci. 7, 320–324) rather than as interdependent ends. To foster ‘climate geroscience’—the field of knowledge and translational science at the intersection of climate science and geroscience—researchers in both fields are encouraged to think of novel ways they could make researchers from the other field ‘conversationally’ present when framing the aspirations of their respective fields, applying for grant funding and designing their conferences and managing their scientific journals.

I really enjoyed working on this paper.  And it is a topic I plan to write more about in the future (with a new paper already in the pipeline).

Cheers, 

Colin 

Drug development in the name of social justice?

This important study is one I want to make a note of on here for future reference.  

It addresses a range of issues I believe are among those most critical not only for communicating the importance of translational gerontology, but for how we conceive of the demands of social justice more broadly.  

The abstract:

The central premise of this article is that a portion of the established relationships between social determinants of health and racial/ethnic disparities in cancer morbidity and mortality are mediated through differences in rates of biological aging processes. We further posit that using knowledge about aging could enable discovery and testing of new mechanism-based pharmaceutical and behavioral interventions ("gerotherapeutics") to differentially improve the health of minoritized cancer survivors and reduce cancer disparities. These hypotheses are based on evidence that lifelong differences in adverse social determinants of health contribute to disparities in rates of biological aging ("social determinants of aging"), with minoritized groups having accelerated aging (ie, a steeper slope or trajectory of biological aging over time relative to chronological age) more often than non-minoritized groups. Acceleration of biological aging can increase the risk, age of onset, aggressivity and/or stage of many adult cancers. There are also documented negative feedback loops whereby the cellular damage caused by cancer and its therapies act as drivers of additional biological aging. Together, these dynamic intersectional forces can contribute to differences in cancer outcomes between minoritized vs non-minoritized survivor populations. We highlight key targetable biological aging mechanisms with potential applications to reducing cancer disparities and discuss methodological considerations for pre-clinical and clinical testing of the impact of gerotherapeutics on cancer outcomes in minoritized populations. Ultimately, the promise of reducing cancer disparities will require broad societal policy changes that address the structural causes of accelerated biological aging and ensure equitable access to all new cancer control paradigms.

Cheers, 

Colin

New Paper in Progress...

 

The sudden onset of the winter weather, coupled with the end of my most hectic teaching term of my career = a coveted opportunity to undertake a deep dive into some new ideas for a paper.  

Cheers, 

Colin

Snapshot from "A brief history of modern aging research"

 

source

Cheers, 

Colin

What is aging? study

Nature news has this interesting piece on the disagreement among researchers who study aging.  What is aging?  A sample from the news story:

A key goal of ageing research is to help people live longer, healthier lives. But the exact causes of ageing, as well as effective approaches to slow or reverse it, remain elusive. For the field to tackle these challenges, researchers need to speak a common language, says Alan Cohen, who studies ageing at Columbia University in New York City. “There doesn’t have to be perfect consensus, but we need to sort things out quite a bit,” he says.

....Researchers also disagree on whether ageing is a disease. More than one-third of respondents said it is, another 38% said it isn’t and the remaining 28% were neutral. Cohen doesn’t favour describing ageing as a disease because it implies that it is something that needs to be eliminated, although many researchers in the field are, to some extent, working towards this goal.

The survey mentioned in the news item is here.

Cheers, 

Colin