LEADING THE WAY TO AGING WELL.

• Position: RESEARCH: NORTH CAROLINA: WAKE FOREST UNIVERSITY SCHOOL OF MEDICINE

Aging affects everyone, so keeping ourselves and senior loved ones healthy is vitally important. What does it take to age well? A team of physician-researchers at Atrium Health Wake Forest Baptist and Wake Forest University School of Medicine --the academic core of the Atrium Health enterprise--are leading the way to ensure that we age well.

Ranked among the top 15 national centers in aging research funding from the National Institutes of Health, these regional institutions are having national impact. The School of Medicine has one of the largest geriatrics and gerontology faculties in the country and is the coordinating center for many nationally prominent aging research trials and NIH research centers focused on improving health in older adults. Wake Forest University School of Medicine has the longest designation, since 1990, as a National Institutes of Health-funded Claude Pepper Older Americans Independence Center in the United States.

Further, the School of Medicine is the only National Institutes of Health Alzheimer's Disease Research Center in the nation co-located with a Claude Pepper Center in the Department of Internal Medicine. This fosters a focus on common lifestyle changes--controlling blood pressure, diabetes treatment and obesity--to provide the best care options for reducing the risk of Alzheimer's disease and physical disability at any age.

Wake Forest University School of Medicine is also a leader in research on the best diets that maintain the correct balance of proteins, carbohydrates and fats to promote healthy aging. The impact of the ratio of these dietary components changes as we age and we study approaches to adjust these components to the level that is safest.

The School of Medicine and Atrium Health's Pepper Center has the largest repository of muscle biopsies in the country, assisting efforts to determine which types of exercise and diets are most suitable for healthy aging.

The unique emphasis of the Alzheimer's Disease Research Center is illustrated in the nationally and internationally recognized research that supports:

* the largest study in the United States looking at how the combination of healthy diet, exercise and cardiovascular risk factor control can preserve memory and thinking and other cognitive skills.

* one of four centers in the nation testing ways to better help caregivers of persons with Alzheimer's disease and other dementias during their Alzheimer's journey.

* 300+ families receiving...