News Item on Play and Risk

 

Nature news has this interesting item on play and risk, I guess better late than never.  A sample:

Over the past two decades, research has emerged showing that opportunities for risky play are crucial for healthy physical, mental and emotional development. Children need these opportunities to develop spatial awareness, coordination, tolerance of uncertainty and confidence.

Despite this, in many nations risky play is now more restricted than ever, thanks to misconceptions about risk and a general undervaluing of its benefits.

 ....The goal of promoting risky play isn’t to turn cautious children into thrill-seekers, it’s simply to allow them to take incremental risks at whatever pace they choose, say proponents. “What risky play looks like for one child will be totally different to what it looks like for another,” says child psychologist Helen Dodd at the University of Exeter, UK. 

Cheers, 

Colin 

Year in Review (2024)

As the year 2024 is coming to an end, I have compiled my usual "reflections on the year".  

As noted early this year (see here, here and here), this year marks the 25th year anniversary of my "professing career".  This milestone, coupled with my kids all growing up and moving on with their own lives, has provoked some serious introspection in me in terms of thinking about the new and future career challenges I would like to undertake in the remaining years of my career.  

I am keen to pursue novel opportunities for exploring both teaching and research at the intersection of biomedical science/ science communication and public policy, as well as political theory and ethics.  I have substantive research projects already underway for the next 3 years, but also some longer term ideas for projects spanning the next 20+ years.  At least in my own mind, I see the 25th year anniversary of my career as roughly the "mid-point" of my academic career, broadly defined.  This may be overly optimistic but my enthusiasm about research and teaching show no signs of waning so I see the next quarter of a century as an incredible opportunity to address some really unique challenges and opportunities that humanity faces.     

The major personal accomplishment for me this year, with respect to research, was the completion and publication of my new book Classics of Political Thought for Today: An Introduction, a book that was a quarter of a century in the making.

This year was also an eventful one for my research on geroscience and climate change, with a number of invitations to present my ideas which then provided the fuel to me writing some new work at the intersection of geroscience and climate science.

According to PubMed, 2024 is my most productive year for journal publications, at least for those dealing with biomedical issues.  However this really reflects the happenstance that a bunch of things just happened to come out officially in print in the same calendar year.  There are always "peak and trough" years for publications.  The peak of this year is not something I could sustain year after year.  Nonetheless, it certainly is a research year I feel sense of accomplishment about.  

My journal publications that appeared in print this year are:

Colin Farrelly (2024) “Climate Geroscience: The Case for “Wisdom-Inquiry” Science” Biology Letters 20(12): 20240426. 

Colin Farrelly, (2024) “The Role of Science Communication in Advancing Translational Gerontology”. Journal of the American Geriatrics Society 72(12): 3931-35. 

Colin Farrelly, (2024). “Imagination and Idealism after the COVID-19 Pandemic: The Science of Healthy Ageing”. Royal Society Open Science 11: 231102. 

 Farrelly C. (2024) "Aging, Equality and the Human Healthspan". HEC Forum. 36(2):187-205. doi: 10.1007/s10730-022-09499-3. 

Farrelly C. (2024) ""Post-Protean" Public Health and the Geroscience Hypothesis". Aging Dis. 15(2):449-458. doi: 10.14336/AD.2023.0721. 

Hajj-Boutros G, Faust A, Muscedere J, Kim P, Abumrad N, Chevalier S, Aubertin-Leheudre M, Bergman H, Bowdish D, Burford J, Carrington-Lawrence S, Côté H, Dawe DE, Barreto PS, Farrelly C, Fowler R, Gouspillou G, Harrington L, Lautrup S, Howlett S, Imani M, Kirkland J, Kuchel G, Mallette FA, Morais JA, Newman JC, Pullman D, Sierra F, Van Raamsdonk J, Watt J, Rylett RJ, Duque G. "Navigating the Landscape of Translational Geroscience in Canada: A Comprehensive Evaluation of Current Progress and Future Directions". J Gerontol A Biol Sci Med Sci. 2024 Jul 1;79(7):glae069. doi: 10.1093/gerona/glae069. 

A few distinctive developments stand out to me about the past year.  Firstly, I have learned to communicate complex ideas visually.  This is a result of publishing a good deal of science journal articles that utilize visuals.  I have been refining this skill set over the past 2 years or so, and I was surprised by how much I enjoy it, as well as how much I have learned from the process.  Expressing ideas visually actually alters how one conceptualizes and communicates one's ideas and insights.  

Here are my favorite visual images that appeared in print this year:

These two images (above/below) are from my JAGS paper.

The image below is from Biology Letters article

The image below is from the Open Science paper

Secondly, I had a few things posted online this year, which is novel for me.  These include my inaugural Peacock lecture, my plenary lecture from RCCN workshop on “Climate Change and Aging" and an online presentation in the Royal Society's "Ecology and Evolution" seminar series.  I was also invited to design a 25 minute video lecture on the ethics of geroscience for geroscientists which is not currently publicly accessible.  

I look forward to the research developments of 2025!

Cheers, 

Colin

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