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Professor Rebecca Silliman. Photo by Vernon Doucette |
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If you fall ill when you’re young or middle aged, the odds are that a doctor will have a pretty good idea what’s needed to make you better. But less health-care research involves older people, and few medical researchers or clinicians specialize in treating the elderly.
It’s part of our national myopia about old age, says School of Medicine Professor Rebecca Silliman, co-director of the Boston University Aging Research Consortium. We are “a youth-oriented society that tends to ignore reality,” she says. And as the large population of baby boomers draws ever closer to old age, the problem becomes even more apparent—and more difficult to solve.
A couple of years ago, Silliman led the effort that set up the Aging Research Consortium, which brings together researchers from the Medical and Charles River Campuses seeking to address “the needs and challenges faced by urban elders,” she says. Funded with an initial grant from the John A. Hartford Foundation, the consortium is made up of faculty from the Schools of Medicine, Public Health, and Social Work and Sargent College. The consortium’s other co-director is SSW Associate Professor Judith Gonyea. Yale, the University of Pennsylvania, Duke, and UCLA also received grants from the foundation to set up similar programs.
The consortium’s research is focused on improving chronic illness care and outcomes, promoting functional independence, and enhancing the care of persons with cognitive impairments. “Those three areas are really crosscutting, and they build on strengths at BU,” says Silliman, who is also chief of the geriatrics section at the BU-affiliated Boston Medical Center.
“You can’t be successful clinically or in research if you don’t have an interdisciplinary perspective, because the issues are so complicated,” she says. “One major vehicle for fostering interdisciplinary research has been through the funding of pilot projects.” So far, the consortium has funded six projects, each of which teams up junior and senior faculty across the health disciplines in MED, SAR, SSW, and SPH.
Research isn’t just academic, of course—the point is to come up with recommendations for clinicians and policymakers. “My concern about health care for older adults is that we make mistakes all the time by either not doing enough or doing too much,” Silliman says. “Part of that is because we do not have a strong and robust evidence base. So if we can get smarter about what we do, theoretically we’ll do better both in terms of not doing too little or too much, and get it right more of the time.”
Silliman’s main area of research is breast cancer care for older women. “Cancer is basically a disease of older adults, and older adults have very much been understudied,” she says. She focuses on “patterns of care in relation to outcomes—from traditional mortality and morbidity to quality-of-life issues, such as upper body function.”
Encouraging junior faculty to focus more on geriatric issues is one of the main aims of the Hartford Foundation grant. In medicine, too few people follow that path, Silliman says; MED is “one of a handful of schools nationwide that has a required clerkship in geriatrics for medical students. We think that’s very important.”
Since the consortium’s inception, several more geriatric heath care grant proposals have been written collaboratively. “One of my goals here at BU is to foster the aging-research enterprise,” Silliman says. “My dream is that BU one day—hopefully not too far into the distant future—will be recognized as a leader in research on aging.” And not only BU will benefit. After all, none of us is getting any younger.
—Taylor McNeil |
