Brief Summary of Minutes of Annual Meeting

Please see attachment for 2023 Annual Meeting Minutes

Note: Day 1 (June 5) NE1939 team members arrival and committees meetings

Short-term outcomes:

Objective 1: To conduct multidimensional assessments of diet, physical activity and related factors affecting aging adults.

Objective 1 projects:

• Provided baseline assessments of body composition, cardiovascular risk factors, nutrition habits, and physical fitness. These assessments will be used to start a wellness initiative to improve overall health.
• Developed a new physical function food security tool to enhance the current USDA food security instrument in order to show a more complete picture of the prevalence of food insecurity in older adults. This may have policy implications in bringing attention to the needs of older adults who may be malnourished or go hungry because of their inability to access food due to physical limitations or disabilities.
• Developed a prioritization tool for the Older American Act Nutrition Program' Home Delivered Meals. This prioritization tool has been mandated for use in Maryland and, other states have adapted the tool for their use.
• Gathering data using the Qualtrics marketing research option to assess the five lifestyle parameters that impact brain health. These data will be used to design and pilot test a brain-health intervention in New York and the District of Columbia.

 Objective 2: To develop, implement and evaluate interventions that preserve or improve health in aging adults living in rural and urban environments.

Objective 2 projects:

• Completed a needs assessment to inform project development, completed a draft of an Extension curriculum to pilot in late fall 2022, and completed a five-day training for graduate students and dietetic interns and Extension personnel.
• Conducting experiments to elucidate the effects of diet in healthy adults with respect to the maintenance of a “healthy gut”.

Outputs

• Collectively we trained 35 undergraduate students, 32 graduate students, 7 post-doctoral associates and 24 extension personnel. The skills acquired by these trainees include:
  • Quantitative research (e.g., data collection, data entry, analysis
  • Qualitative research
  • Professional writing
  • Laboratory skills
  • Anthropometric measures
  • Nutritional status assessment
  • Dietary intake assessment
  • Education on topics to support nutrition education for older adults (nutritional needs, ageism, etc)
• Collectively we received 19 grants $9, 174,975 total: 12 federals, 2 state, 2 university, 1 research station, and 1 foundation grant.
• The team published 26 journal articles including 4 joint journal articles (DC, IL, IA, MD, RI, SD, WV) and 21 published abstracts including 1 joint (IA, LA).
• The team provided 18 research presentations.
• Measurable benefits to junior non-tenured faculty in establishing their research agendas including publications, interinstitutional collaborations, and election to leadership positions within this project.

Activities

• Seven states (DC, IL, IA, MD, RI, SD, WV) are actively working on publishing findings from a 2020 collaborative needs assessment study. Two papers have been published from that project and four more papers are either in review or in preparation.
• We submitted two joint grant applications focused on sarcopenia.
  • USDA-NIFA Submission: Partnership StrengthenHer: Empowering Women through a Multi-State Virtual Online Sarcopenia Prevention Program" (SD, IA, RI, WV, AR, DC; project formerly referred to as LifeSPAN)
  • NIH Grant Submission: “Translational Approach to Defining Sarcopenia” (SD & IA)
• Group of members also work collaboratively on the Brian health study

Impact of NE1939 related work:

• Understanding macrophage reprogramming is crucial for combatting meta-inflammation, relevant to a wide range of age-related chronic diseases. Our discoveries suggest that GHS-R antagonists may serve as a novel approach to immunotherapy, offering the potential for preventing and treating obesity-related chronic diseases associated with aging. The results of our controlled clinical intervention will help to translate the current mechanistic knowledge from preclinical animal models to humans and to de-risk and inform approaches for inflammatory bowel disease and cancer prevention. Interrogating the stool exfoliome is a novel, cost-effective, non-invasive approach to studying the effects of interventions on the human gut.
• Outcomes related to the NE1939 study in tactical professionals included providing baseline assessments of body composition, cardiovascular risk factors, nutrition habits, and physical fitness. These assessments will be used to start a wellness initiative to improve overall health.
• The intended audience continues to build the capacity of junior faculty towards tenure and promotion. The direct benefit is the number of articles published from this data set targeted at physical activity, exercise, diet, and quality of life issues. The impact of their dissemination efforts would provide social, health and environmental benefits to those who interact with older adults thus bridging health policy gaps designed to increase the quality of life for the older urban residing adult. One junior faculty is writing a SUREfirst grant for submission to NIH based on our multistate research and mentorship from the multistate collaboration.

 Milestones:

Objective 1:

• Testing a food security cross-classification method using the USDA food security tool and the Physical function food security tool. This is in collaboration with colleagues from the federal government.
• We have characterized how dietary fatty acids, especially linoleate (LA) impact mitochondrial membrane composition and ATP production in tissues from mice and in PBMCs from clinical trials.

 Objective 2:

• We completed all flow cytometry experiments in BMDM and Seahorse analysis in young and middle-aged mice, next period, we will finish the old age group. Since the scientific community now emphasizes considering sex as a biological variable, studies need to be conduct in both male and female animals. Most of our data so far are mostly in male mice, a major focus next period is to catch up on female data for various ages
• Piloted Socially Nutritious curriculum. Initiated recruitment for Socially Nutritious intervention. Completed three Socially Nutritious virtual workshops.
• We have completed a randomized, controlled crossover pilot study in 30 healthy men and women (50-75 y) to compare supplemental soluble fiber (35 g/d) + supplemental n-3 polyunsaturated fatty acid (PUFA) (6 g/d EPA + DHA) with a maltodextrin and corn oil control. Stool samples were collected at the beginning, middle (day 15) and end of each of the two 30-day intervention periods. In the next period, we will evaluate differences in global gene expression signatures in the stool exfoliome (i.e., sloughed intestinal epithelial cells in stool) using RNA-Seq. Pathways related to intestinal cell proliferation, apoptosis/ferroptosis, cell phenotype, and inflammatory response will be examined along with changes in gut microbial genes involved in short-chain fatty acid production.

Please see attached document for publications