Center Overview
Multiple Principal Investigators: Jeremy Walston, MD and Karen Bandeen-Roche, PhD
Funded by: NIH Grant P30AG021334.
Frailty is recognized as an age-related condition in which older adults lose the capacity to cope with stressors and become vulnerable to functional decline, loss of independence, and mortality. Since its original funding in 2003, the novel approaches of the Johns Hopkins University (JHU) Claude D. Pepper Older Americans Independence Center (OAIC) have helped to demonstrate that frailty is a syndrome caused by multiple biological mechanisms that are expressed through characteristics of decreased resiliency and reserve in older adults. Frailty research provides a highly productive framework for clinical, population-based and biological discovery and for the development of junior investigators for academic careers in frailty and aging research.
The mission of the JHU OAIC is to provide a hypothesis-driven, frailty-focused, highly interdisciplinary center where supported investigators receive the expertise, resources, and training necessary to make fundamental discoveries related to the origins and causes of frailty and then move these discoveries towards frailty-focused interventions.
The JHU OAIC is comprised of seven main cores, as shown in the following figure.
