Jeremy Walston, MD, Principal Investigator
Karen Bandeen-Roche, PhD, Co-Principal Investigator
The central concern, even raison d’être, of geriatric medicine is the care of frail older adults and the prevention of adverse outcomes for which they are at risk. This group is thought, clinically, to be the highest risk subset of older adults, vulnerable to many stressors and highly prone to disability, dependency and mortality. The new consensus as to the measurement and nature of frailty suggests that it is a biologic syndrome of aging involving dysregulation of multiple physiologic systems that, in the aggregate, leaves the individual highly vulnerable to stressors. Frailty has early stages that may be prevented or are remediable, and the dysregulations and vulnerabilities of frailty need to be considered in diagnostic and treatment plans. The Johns Hopkins Claude D. Pepper Older Americans Independence Center was originally funded in June 2003, and was refunded for five additional years in July 2008. The goal of this Center is to support the next generation of researchers to determine causes and treatments for frailty in older adults. The Center seeks to provide the following resources to investigators throughout the Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions:
1) multidisciplinary leadership for a research program investigating frailty, its etiology and treatment
2) key infrastructure and access to emerging technologies essential to developing leading-edge discoveries of the ultimate causes of frailty and its treatments, including two research cores, Genetics and Biostatistics, to support discovery at the molecular level, at the level of the whole person
and in complex analytic approaches relating the two disciplines
3) development of new methodologies needed to study the complex syndrome of frailty
4) support for pilot projects on frailty in older adults that can lay the basis for development of novel interventions to diagnose, prevent or treat frailty, or to minimize adverse outcomes related to the presence of frailty
5) support for junior faculty committed to developing research careers on the science of frailty in aging, offering support for protected time and mentorship for junior faculty whose career commitment is to this area, and providing training and educational activities for these and other investigators and trainees throughout the Medical Institutions
6) serve as a source of advice and collaboration to investigators in the area of research on frailty in aging. The base for this Center is in the Johns Hopkins Center on Aging and Health, a Center of Excellence for Aging Research jointly sponsored by the Schools of medicine, public health and nursing. | 
