Concentration: Aging

Project Mentor: Richard Besdine, MD

Graduation Year: MD 2010

Concentration Title:
Aging Curriculum Development for Brain Sciences

Concentration Description:
The US and world population are rapidly aging, mainly due to increased life expectancy and decreased fertility. Many diseases are not only more common with age, but also have special considerations, such as clinical presentation, diagnosis, and treatment, in elderly compared with younger patients. Many normal processes also manifest themselves in old age that may mimic pathology. To facilitate providing care to growing number of older patients, future healthcare provider have an increasing need to become familiar with the effect of age on disease processes, and be able to distinguish between normal aging processes and pathologic ones. The Brain Sciences block in the first year medical curriculum was a 3 month long course and had very few content devoted to the care of the elderly. The goal of my concentration is to develop a comprehensive aging curriculum for incorporation into the Brain Science block in 1st year medical school curriculum. To this end, I research the literature on various lecture topics in Brain sciences, including neurobiology, neurology, neuropharmacology, and neuropsychiatry, using online resources like Pubmed, as well as textbooks in geriatrics and gerontology. I then summarize and organize the aging content relevant to each lecture topic into a syllabus outline for that topic, including reference to all the literature I used. The sum of all aging syllabus outlines is the final product of my concentration work, which is then incorporated into the lectures materials for the Brain Sciences block.