May 15, 2025
Living Better for Longer
Pitt’s Aging Institute draws on the power of diverse scientific perspectives to enhance lifespans.
Living Better for Longer
By Strategic Communications
While a wall calendar and a birth certificate do the trick for determining a person’s chronological age, pinning down biological aging remains complex.
The interdisciplinary researchers at the University of Pittsburgh’s Aging Institute are reaching new insights that paint a clearer picture of what it means for the human body to get older—and how to make that process a healthier one.
“Aging is one of the least understood biological processes,” says Toren Finkel, director of the Aging Institute. “It’s something—if we’re lucky—we all do, yet we don’t understand why or how.”
Anne Newman, Distinguished Professor Emerita in the Schools of Public Health and of Medicine, who was until recently clinical director of the Aging Institute, is among those shedding new light on aging.
“That’s been very inspiring to me, to see that many of these folks who are volunteering for our study are thriving. They tell us what’s possible.”
Anne Newman, Distinguished Professor Emerita
She and her collaborators are conducting the largest-ever study (the Study of Muscle, Mobility and Aging, or SOMMA) focused on understanding how muscles weaken and mobility declines during aging. The team is measuring the participants’ physical functioning along with biological factors that could be at play in the muscle tissue, such as mitochondrial function, genetic expression and muscle innervation.
In the first five years of the study, they collected data indicating that mitochondrial function was strongly related to walking ability and peak oxygen consumption on a treadmill test. Newman recently turned over the principal investigator role to her colleague Nancy Glynn, associate professor of epidemiology, School of Public Health, but remains a co-investigator on the study.
Newman says that her work with clinical research volunteers, many of whom have remained healthy into old age, reminds her what the focus of aging research should be.
“That’s been very inspiring to me, to see that many of these folks who are volunteering for our study are thriving,” she says. “They tell us what’s possible.”
Hers is one study of many at the institute by researchers inspired to explore human longevity.