KPA AGING Seed Funding Supports Four New Interdisciplinary Projects in Aging Research
The accelerating demographic change towards an increasingly aging society poses urgent socio-economic and health challenges with consequences across all sectors of public life. The KPA Aging-Associated Diseases (AGING) of the University of Cologne pursues to gain deeper insights into how the aging process and age-related diseases are influence by environmental, gender-specific, transgenerational factors, as well as social, socioeconomic, and anthropological conditions.
To maintain and further expand the critical mass and infrastructure of the KPA AGING, and to promote new collaboration between researchers from various faculties at the University of Cologne, new projects on “Demographic Change Toward an Aging Society” will be initiated.
In their research project “Mapping immunometabolic ageing trajectories across tissues” CECAD PIs Mauro Corrado and Christian Frezza aim to investigate, through the combination of longitudinal analyses of key organs with an analysis of the immune system and metabolism, when and where age-related functional impairments occur, how the decline in immune and metabolic functions are interlinked, and whether tissue-specific signatures can identify early, targeted aging processes before the organism fails.
In their project “Shaping individual trajectories to Alzheimer’s Disease by social orientation,” CECAD Principal Investigator Matteo Bergami and Erik N. Dzwiza-Ohlsen from the Faculty of Arts and Humanities are exploring the interdependence between social factors and dementia, with a particular focus on Alzheimer’s disease.
Gabriele Zaffagnini, Miguel Alejandre Alcázar, David Meyer, and Tanja Groten from the Faculty of Medicine plan to investigate the mechanisms of obesity-driven intergenerational metabolic priming in their project “Parental meta-inflammatory determinants of intergenerational inheritance: how obese parents predispose the offspring for aging and disease.”
The pilot study “Loneliness, Social Participation, and Healthy Aging in Urban Neighborhoods—A Participatory Feasibility Study (URBAN-AGE)” by Nicole Skoetz of the Institute of Public Health and Lea Ellwardt of the Faculty of Economics and Social Sciences shifts the focus from biological aging processes to the social and spatial contexts in which aging unfolds.
The funded researchers will present their projects at a workshop which will take place on July 14th from 9-12h in the CECAD Lecture Hall. For organizational reasons we kindly ask you to sign up HERE