Grant: Project Grant

If all Canadians aged in good health, we would have minimal strain on the health care system while reaping the rewards of older adults' unpaid caregiving, civic engagement, extended participation in the workforce and extensive volunteerism. Unhealthy aging deprives Canadians of the talents of older adults and their caregivers while increasing health care costs. The microbes that live in our gut can influence our health in many ways and may even determine how healthy we are in late life. Recent data from our team show that the composition of the microbes in our guts change with age and that these changes can accelerate unhealthy aging. We think that these 'bad bugs' cause the gut to become leaky. Once microbes leave the gut they are sensed by the immune system. When the immune system mistakes this for an infection it triggers an inflammatory response, which over months to years, causes damage and contributes to unhealthy aging. Our proposal aims to answer two questions "What causes the gut microbes to change with age?" and "How do these changes accelerate unhealthy aging?". These questions are difficult to answer in humans because it is hard to untangle the role of medical conditions, medications, and lifestyle factors that also can change gut microbes. To overcome this challenge, we will use our aging mice. We have developed a scoring system to measure healthy and unhealthy aging mice. This allows us to compare the gut microbiomes of mice that age well and those that age poorly. We will also determine whether age-related changes in the gut allow problematic microbes to survive and thrive while reducing the number of harmless or helpful microbes. Once we identify which are the 'bad bugs' we will know which ones we should get rid of through vaccination, probiotic/diet interventions or with other medications to improve health in late life.