At Mature Resources, we offer a variety of services to support our community. From counseling and mentorship programs to educational workshops and outreach initiatives, we are dedicated to making a positive impact in the lives of those we serve.
Our Impact
The Meals on Wheels and More
program delivered 80,628
hot meals and 10,922 frozen meals
The Agency registered
1,771 new consumers
this fiscal year
26,565 meals were
provided at
Centers for Active
Living
278 Health and Wellness Programs delivered
This Month's News
'Solo agers' are a growing group. Changes that would help them could help everyone
Ailene Gerhardt hears a lot of stories. It's all part of her job. She's a patient advocate, helping people navigate their care and the complexities of the healthcare system. During the last several years she's heard from more and more people getting older without adult children, a spouse, or both. But the healthcare system remains stuck in the past, she says, assuming older people have family to support them, when that's often not the case.
Gerhardt started and runs a network called Navigating Solo, which offers support and community to this group of older adults, often referred to as "solo agers."
"Instead of looking at the concept of solo aging as something that's a crisis to be solved — it's not a crisis to be solved," she says. "It's a reality to be supported."
That reality is growing as Baby Boomers and Gen Xers age. According to a 2023 AARP report, one in ten adults over age 50 lives alone and doesn't have a partner or children. Different lifestyles and changing societal attitudes suggest these numbers will grow in the future. Plenty of people are single by choice.
More inclusive systemsGerhardt says right now, solo agers are expected to take the lead in planning for their housing, finances, and transportation to appointments, often by hiring professionals to help them. But rather than feeling like the odd ones out in systems that cater to couples and families, she says, why can't the systems themselves be more inclusive of solo agers?To take one example: instead of assuming every patient has someone who can pick them up from a medical appointment after being under anesthesia — and drive them home — she'd like the onus to be on hospitals and medical offices to arrange transport and an escort. She says she has heard from people who have canceled a procedure because their ride backed out at the last minute.
"In both my solo aging advocacy hat and my healthcare advocate [hat], like, that is just infuriating," she says, "that people do not have the support they need to maintain their health in a productive way."
But Gerhardt says this isn't an intractable problem. "Let's look at designing the system, or re-designing the system, so that anyone and everyone can have strong support. Quite honestly that benefits everyone," she says, citing curb cuts as a good example of this. Disability rights advocates fought for years to have towns and cities install curb cuts — a slope from the sidewalk to the street that lets a wheelchair user cross the road easily and safely. But curb cuts quickly became popular with people pushing strollers, bikers, and anyone else seeking an easier way into the street.
Building services for the future
Sara Zeff Geber has been writing and speaking about solo aging for more than 10 years, including giving talks to lawyers and financial planners, "to bring awareness to the fact that not everybody is a couple and not everybody has that proverbial adult daughter to help them."
She believes she was the first person to use the term "solo aging," seeing it as a lot more positive than the previous description: "elder orphans."
Ideas about relationships and parenthood are less rigid than they used to be. Given this, she says, "Whatever foundation we build now" for solo agers, "is going to be hugely important for generations that follow."
Jason Resendez hopes those generations will have more government support than the current crop of older adults. He is CEO of the National Alliance for Caregiving. He says there is growing recognition that many people are aging by themselves. That said, federal funding cuts are coming to home-based services for older adults, and to Medicaid, he says, "which makes it a lot harder to age in place when you don't have a family caregiver to absorb the elimination of those social service supports."
Study Maps Existing Drugs to the Hallmarks of Aging
By Arkadi Mazin
A new study suggests a way to predict whether existing drugs can extend human lifespan. This method uses a network approach that detects longevity signals in protein interactions [1].
Slowing aging with existing drugs?
Finding drugs that can slow aging, a multifactorial process involving thousands of genes, is hard. Directly measuring the effect of a prospective drug on human aging would take decades, so scientists need proxy markers, such as epigenetic clocks. Another hurdle is regulation, as the system is geared towards single-disease indications. On the other hand, thousands of drugs for these diseases have already been approved. What if some of them also affect the rate of aging, and how can we unlock this potential?
A new study from Northeastern University and Harvard, published in Nature Aging, offers an interesting way forward. “As someone whose hair turned gray years ago, I share the universal wish that there might one day be a pill that slows aspects of aging,” said Albert-László Barabási, Distinguished University Professor of Physics at Northeastern who oversaw the study. “The challenge is figuring out which drugs are worth testing.”
Hitting the hallmarks
The study is based on network medicine, a framework that the Barabási lab has developed over fifteen years. Its core idea is that proteins do not act in isolation but form a giant graph (the interactome) that shows which proteins interact physically or functionally. Genes underlying a given disease tend to clump together into a “disease module.” Once such a module is outlined, scientists can ask which drugs have targets in the vicinity of that “neighborhood” and are thus candidates for perturbing it. This approach has been used before for asthma, heart disease, and COVID-19 [2].
The Hallmarks of Aging has been a defining paradigm in geroscience for many years. It includes crucial biological features and processes that get disrupted with age, such as DNA stability and intercellular communication. This study is built on the premise that each hallmark of aging behaves not unlike a disease module and that the same machinery that network medicine applies to diseases can therefore be used with these hallmarks.
“You have genes related to aging by some definition or by some reasoning, but it feels like you just have a very big pile of genes related to aging,” said Bnaya Gross, a postdoctoral researcher in Barabási’s lab at Northeastern and lead author of the study. “Networks allow us to organize them, saying, OK, it’s not just a pile of genes. They are connected to each other. They form some sort of organization. It’s not a random process.”
The researchers started from the OpenGenes database, a manually curated resource linking 2,358 genes to aging/longevity. Each gene is tagged with a confidence level from 1 (changing the gene’s activity actually extends mammalian lifespan) to 5 (lowest, weak association). Notably, only 26 genes sit at confidence level 1. 1,250 of the genes could be assigned to at least one hallmark of aging; the remaining 1,108 are still aging-linked but couldn’t be pinned to a specific hallmark. 860 genes belong to a single hallmark and 390 to multiple hallmarks, with TP53 spanning the most (seven).
The fact that many genes are related to several hallmarks shows their interconnectedness via shared molecular machinery. The network approach is quite good at catching this complex web of interactions, while also showing that the hallmarks occupy distinct nodes in it. The team then validated that their 1,250-gene set is largely related to aging and mapped the genes onto the human interactome: a network of more than 500 thousand experimentally supported interactions among proteins.
The team then took 6,442 compounds from DrugBank and, for each hallmark module, measured each drug’s network proximity – the average shortest-path distance from the drug’s protein targets to the nearest hallmark genes. Drugs whose targets sit significantly closer than chance are predicted to perturb that hallmark. However, they found that some of the hits acted in the opposite direction – for instance, induced rather than lowered cellular senescence. So, proximity alone correctly identifies drugs that act on a hallmark but not whether they help or harm.
Turning the pAGE
The researchers devised a metric that accounts for directionality and called it pAGE. They outlined a Systematic Hallmark-based Aging Repurposing Pipeline (SHARP) based on proximity and pAGE, and they validated it against drugs tested in mammalian longevity studies. For instance, out of the eight compounds that increased mouse lifespan in the Intervention Testing Program (ITP) trials and also had interactomic data, all had a positive pAGE for at least one hallmark. Of the drugs that failed in the ITP, less than half did. Interestingly, some pro-longevity drugs were beneficial for some hallmarks but harmful for others, highlighting possible trade-offs.
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Another test came from drugs currently in human longevity trials, such as metformin and rapamycin. Of the 17 compounds, 11 had significant proximity. Interestingly, aspirin was mapped to six hallmarks and dasatinib to five, whereas rapamycin hit only one: intercellular communication. Finally, the team successfully tested their method on 10 compounds from a parallel study whose results appeared after their predictions [3] – the closest thing to a prospective test.
The researchers then ran SHARP across all hallmarks to generate candidates. They identified 370 drugs that are proximal to at least one hallmark, and 83 of them are “network drugs” that do not directly target any aging gene but affect a hallmark module through the network topology. These would be invisible to any method that looks solely at direct drug-target relationships, and they are the strongest argument for the network approach. The team showed their predictions are mechanistically interpretable by analyzing how exactly oxymetazoline – a nasal/topical decongestant and rosacea drug – affects longevity-related genes.