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Professor Emma Duncan
Professor of Clinical Endocrinology
School of Life Course & Population Sciences
Talk title: “Making Old Bones Good Bones"
Each year in the UK, more than 76000 men and women fracture their hips, and countless more suffer vertebral, humeral, and wrist fractures. Osteoporotic fractures cost the UK more than £4.5 billion annually; yet despite a host of proven effective interventions, only a tiny amount (<3% of the annual costs) is currently spent on prevention – moreover, access to osteoporosis services is a postcode lottery.
Osteoporosis is not an inevitable part of ageing, nor is osteoporosis limited to older individuals. In this talk I will discuss what works, what doesn’t, and what we can do to promote healthy bones across the lifespan.
Dr Amy Roberts
Postdoctoral Research Fellow
School of Life Course & Population Sciences
Talk title: "X marks the cell: what can X chromosome inactivation tell us about immune system ageing?"
X chromosome inactivation (XCI) functionally silences either the maternal or paternal X in every 46, XX mammalian cell. The XCI status of a cell is stable and clonally inherited by all daughter cells giving an expected 1:1 ratio across a tissue. However, some females display a “skewed” pattern of XCI (XCI-skew) in immune cells.
The prevalence of XCI-skew significantly increases with age - affecting over a third of females over 60 - and is associated with adverse health outcomes. As XCI-skew of peripheral immune cells must reflects changes in the underlying haematopoietic stem cells, it potentially offers a unique lens through which to study the ageing immune system.