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My research focuses on what happens to our immune system as we age. So
the job of the immune system is to fight infections but also to protect us from
cancer and also from auto-immune diseases. We know as we get older that
we’re more susceptible to infections, so an older adult has more chance of
catching a pneumonia, of catching flu, but also they’re more susceptible to
cancer as well. So this is all evidence that our immune system really doesn’t
function as well when we age.
In most of our work when we’re looking at older adults who’ve got an illness,
we always have to have healthy controls, so we work very closely with a great
group of volunteers called the Birmingham 1000 Elders who are all 65 or over
but in good health and they volunteer to come to the university to provide us
with blood samples, to help us with questionnaires, to carry out a whole range
of research.
A real impact of our research is going to be on health in old age. So at the
moment we’re living much longer, life expectancy is increasing at two years
for every decade. That means five hours a day and I want to make sure that
an older adult, if they’re put under any sort of stress, whether it’s a fall,
whether it’s caring for a loved one, that they’re still able to enjoy that old age
and that they’re not spending time in hospital with infections, feeling unwell
and being generally frail after such an event.