Improvements to metabolic health reduces seniors’ frailty: study
HALIFAX — A study by researchers at Dalhousie University shows that frailty in older adults may increase the risk of developing metabolic diseases, while poor metabolic health can likewise accelerate frailty.
Susan Howlett, a professor in Dal’s pharmacology department, also found that interventions that modify metabolism can reduce the degree of frailty, even in later years.
Howlett helped develop a frailty index used widely in animal research. She said things like metabolism can be affected by aging “and there are many different underlying mechanisms involved that are the pillars or hallmarks of aging and frailty, and they can start to go awry. While metabolic disease can certainly predispose someone toward frailty, it’s likely that all of these things going wrong in the body are predisposing to problems with metabolism and other diseases of aging like diabetes, cancer, cardiovascular disease and so on.”
The new thinking is to try to develop strategies to treat those underlying mechanisms.
She said for older people, particularly older women, adding something like exercise, particularly strength training, plus adequate nutrients including protein “really does reduce frailty,” Howlett said. “There are some really interesting gains that can be made before we come up with drugs that can target some of these (issues), that can be deployed now.”
Her next step is applying for a grant to perform a study that looks at different lifestyle modifications to treat frailty and improve cardiovascular health and other outcomes.
“It would also include weight training, which a lot of people don’t think of as being beneficial towards cardiovascular health,” Howlett said. “It has disproportionate benefits for older people, especially older women.”
She said studies with mice showed that adding some of the interventions like exercise and better diet stopped frailty in males, but female mice actually improved and reduced their frailty.
“I was fascinated to find out that the same thing is found in people, so older women should be taking up exercise and strength training. Anything that will preserve muscle mass is going to have huge benefits in your late life.”
She said her work with frailty in mice took other research in new directions rather than just finding ways to make people live longer.
“(To) live longer is not adequate, we don’t want to just live for a really long time in poor health. We’d like to improve our health span.”
Howlett said as far as she knows no one had ever put together a review of the intersection between metabolism and frailty before, and “you really do get into a vicious cycle of metabolic derangement caused by accelerated aging mechanisms, which starts to promote frailty, and frailty sets the stage for this metabolic dysregulation. Unless you can disrupt it, it’s just going to lead to poorer and poorer health.”
Howlett’s findings were published this week in the journal Cell Metabolism.