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Environmental Health and Aging: Activity, Exposure and Biological Models to Improve Risk Assessment and Health Promotion
Citation:
Geller, A. M. AND K. Sykes. Environmental Health and Aging: Activity, Exposure and Biological Models to Improve Risk Assessment and Health Promotion. Presented at Annual Meeting of Gerontological Society of America, San Francisco, CA, November 19, 2007.
Impact/Purpose:
This symposium will describe research efforts to link critical environmental exposures in the home and general environment to adverse health outcomes experienced by older adults.
Description:
The US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and other public health agencies are concerned that the environmental health of America’s growing population of older adults has not been taken into consideration in current approaches to risk assessment. The reduced capacity to respond to external stressors that characterizes aging suggests that exposures that induce adaptive responses in young adults may yield toxicological responses in older adults. Accumulating evidence from recent environmental health studies has raised concerns over the environmental etiology of diseases of aging. This symposium will describe research efforts to link critical environmental exposures in the home and general environment to adverse health outcomes experienced by older adults. We will describe 1) how significant changes with age in living conditions, local environments and activity patterns may result in new exposures and new risks; 2) recent results from molecular, in vitro, and in vivo models of detoxification pathways in aging, and findings on the effects of environmental contaminants on the cardiovascular, hepatic, and central nervous systems; 3) progress in developing integrated predictive models of toxicant exposures, kinetics and health effects; and 4) how to apply this activity, exposure, and biological data to develop risk assessments, education, and outreach for the aging population.