By Professor Karyn Hamilton, Colorado State University, US and Professor Colin Selman, University of Glasgow, UK
Ageing brings many potential benefits including greater confidence, financial stability, discounts on travel, and a wealth of wisdom. However, healthy ageing may require a greater need to respond to environmental and cellular stresses by adapting and re-establishing homeostasis.
Simply put, homeostasis is a healthy state that is maintained by the constant adjustment of biochemical and physiological pathways in response to cellular and physiological challenges or stresses.
Mounting evidence suggests that declining mechanisms for adapting to escalating cellular and physiological stresses during ageing may contribute to a decline in overall resilience and an increase in the incidence and severity of age-related chronic diseases.
The good news, however, is physical activity may help to offset the age-related decline in the cellular and physiological processes required to adapt to stress.
An online symposium to be held virtually on 12 October will address the potential benefits of physical exercise for healthy stress adaptation with advancing age.
The symposium will look a bit like this. Professors Colin Selman and Karyn Hamilton will provide an overview of the notion of adaptive homeostasis, and then host five outstanding international speakers who will discuss how exercise can help ameliorate the age-related decline in adaptive homeostasis in different body systems, including the brain, the vasculature and the musculoskeletal system.
Professor Ylva Hellsten of the University of Copenhagen, Denmark conducts research including investigating the importance of estrogen to vascular health in females, and will discuss the role of exercise in mitigating vascular ageing.
Professor Áine Kelly of Trinity College, Dublin is a neuroscientist whose research interests include how exercise can act to enhance cognitive processes such as learning and memory. She will provide an overview on the beneficial impact of exercise on cognitive function and neuroinflammation during ageing.
Ageing is associated with a significant impairment in sleep quality, with this impairment more apparent in females, particularly post-menopause. Dr Josiane Broussard of Colorado State University, US will review the evidence that exercise can mitigate against age-associated circadian disruption and the relevance of this to metabolic homeostasis.
Professor Dr Christoph Handschin from the University of Basel, Switzerland is interested in understanding the molecular process underlying muscle disease and age-related muscle loss, in order to identify intervention strategies that counteract against these pathologies. He will summarise the relevance of pharmacology and exercise in mitigating neuromuscular decline with advancing age.
The plenary speaker Professor Anne McArdle of the University of Liverpool, UK has had a celebrated career in ageing research. She will highlight multidisciplinary approaches to investigate the role of redox stress in age-related skeletal muscle dysfunction, and discuss how interventions such as exercise can promote adaptation to, and thus, afford protection against age-associated skeletal muscle dysfunction.
The final session of this Physiological Society online symposium will be facilitated by early career researchers from around the globe.
Alongside the speakers, they will discuss gaps in our current knowledge about exercise and ageing, identify funding priorities and offer guidance for early career researchers interested in this field of research.
These early career investigators are Dr Zsuzsanna Barad, Dr Lasse Gliemann, Dr Shah Shigdar and Dr Corey Rynders. This will be an outstanding opportunity for trainees and other early career scientists interested in exercise and ageing to interface with both established and “rising star” scientists from around the world.
Register by 4 October for The Society’s upcoming symposium Can Exercise Prevent the Age-Related Decline in Adaptive Homeostasis? Evidence Across Organisms and Tissues.