Graduate Student Charlie Collinge Advances New Model for Measuring Biological Aging
How do we measure the "true" age of a living being? While birthdays provide a chronological count, biological aging is a far more complex and varied process. Charlie Collinge, graduate student, co-authored the new study published in The Journals of Gerontology: Biological Sciences, entitled “Social and clinical frailty indices in aging mince: A comparative analysis of longitudinal and cross-sectional designs.” This study, led by his post-bacc advisor, Alessandro Bartomolucci, and research team member Maria Razzoli, in the UMN Department of Integrative Biology and Physiology, and in collaboration with his advisor Monica Luciana, introduces a multidimensional approach to better understand how aging unfolds.
The study focuses on integrating two key measures in laboratory mice: the Clinical Frailty Index (CFI), which captures physical health deficits, and the Mouse Social Frailty Index (mSFI), which tracks age-related changes in social behavior. The findings show that both physical and social frailty increase with age, and that combining these measures, alongside sex differences, provides a more precise estimate of a mouse’s age than either measure alone.
By demonstrating that social behavior changes alongside physical health, Collinge’s work offers an important advance for geroscience research, helping scientists better understand why some individuals age faster than others. Additional work is in progress to measure social frailty in humans.
Charlie Collinge, Doctoral Candidate, Department of Psychology, College of Liberal Arts, University of Minnesota; member of the Brain and Behavioral Processes Laboratory.
Alessandro Bartolomucci, Department of Integrative Biology and Physiology, Medical School, University of Minnesota; director of the Bartolomucci Lab.
Monica Luciana, PhD, professor in the Department of Psychology, College of Liberal Arts, University of Minnesota; director of the Brain and Behavioral Processes Laboratory.
Composed by Nguyen Kiet Pham, communications assistant.
