What’s the secret to resilient aging? Innovative UB center at The Brothers of Mercy aims to find out

BUFFALO, N.Y. — Why do some people remain highly energetic and able to maintain their normal routine well into their 90s while others seem to begin an age-related decline in their 70s or earlier?

To find out, the University at Buffalo has established the UB Aging and Resilience Research Center. Opening today in the Russell J. Salvatore Health Center, the new health facility on The Brothers of Mercy Wellness Campus in Clarence, N.Y., the UB center is dedicated to identifying the factors that contribute to healthy, resilient aging and developing interventions so that more people can benefit from them. Funding for the UB center was provided by the Mother Cabrini Foundation to The Brothers of Mercy.

“The UB Aging and Resilience Research Center is a prime example of how the Jacobs School works directly with community partners to improve the health of Western New Yorkers,” says Allison Brashear, MD, vice president for health sciences at UB and dean of the Jacobs School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences. “Healthy aging is one of the Jacobs School’s key research priorities, so we are pleased that The Brothers of Mercy is making it possible for us to bring this research and the results it generates directly to the people who will most benefit from it.”

Novel partnership

Nikhil Satchidanand PhD, assistant professor of medicine at the Jacobs School and the center’s founder and director, asserts that this is a novel partnership between a senior living community and an academic research center.

“The Brothers of Mercy definitely has an innovative vision in its commitment to host and support our center,” he says. “Our goal is to conduct real-world, relevant research to develop novel strategies to improve recovery capacity and reduce frailty in older adults. We believe that situating the center here, on The Brothers of Mercy campus, will allow us to gain a perspective on aging that is more holistic than what is possible in a traditional research setting. We see older adults as our partners in understanding how we can best support them as they age healthfully, on their own terms.”

Participants will be recruited among residents at The Brothers of Mercy and from the local community. Satchidanand stressed that the center is a nonclinical setting that will not provide health-related services, and that the goal is to gather data about how people can age well.

“Our residents will be able to participate and benefit from having the University at Buffalo Aging and Resilience Research Center as part of the new Russell J. Salvatore Health Center on the campus,” says Peter Eimer, CEO of The Brothers of Mercy Wellness Campus. “This research fits nicely into our mission and our rehabilitation services, and the Health Center includes other services for the campus and community. We are continuing to be open to other medical organizations moving into the facility.”

Variable outcomes

Satchidanand is especially interested in how much outcomes among older adults can vary after an injury and surgery.

“As an exercise physiologist, I’m interested in exploring the intersection between  established markers of physical fitness and resilience in aging,” he says. “Does higher aerobic capacity or muscular strength predict a more favorable recovery from illness or injury? There’s a great deal of variability in aging. You can compare two older adults, both suffering a hip fracture: One person bounces back quite quickly after surgery and rehab while for the other one, the injury becomes that trigger of decline, leading to loss of independence.”

The research could, for example, lead to the development of prescreening tools to identify people who are more at risk for a sharp decline in health and function, and permanent loss of independence.

Such tools could be useful before someone goes in for hip surgery, for example.

“One question is, can we start screening people for certain physical factors that could predispose them to worse outcomes?” asks Satchidanand. “And maybe people who are more compromised can have better outcomes if, for example, they do prehabilitative therapy for a period before they have surgery. While prehabilitation is being performed in some settings, it is not in widespread use. My goal is to develop interventions that will help people build higher physical resilience.”

The center is focused on running small pilot studies to begin with in order to gather data on these critical aging issues, after which the UB researchers will apply for larger federal funding on healthy aging.