Jeremy Walston MD's Blog

Jeremy Walston is the Raymond and Anna Lublin Professor of Geriatric Medicine in the Division of Geriatric Medicine and Gerontology, the Principal Investigator of the Johns Hopkins Older Americans Independence Center (OAIC), which focuses on the etiologies of frailty and on interventions that may impact frailty and late life vulnerability. He received his MD from the University of Cincinnati School of Medicine, and completed a General Internal Medicine residency and a Geriatric Medicine and Gerontology post-doctoral fellowship at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. During his fellowship, he trained in the diabetes and genetics laboratories of Drs. Alan Shuldiner and Jesse Roth, where he learned to utilize basic molecular and genetic approaches to study complex disease. He helped to identify one of the first gene variants known to contribute to both obesity and type 2 diabetes mellitus. Since that time, he has worked with a multidisciplinary team of investigators and trainees focused on aging and frailty to develop the most widely utilized frailty definition and phenotype and on the development of a mouse model of frailty.

Dr. Walston's laboratory based research program focuses on the identification of age-related molecular and physiological changes that contribute to frailty and chronic disease states, and on the development of clinically relevant interventions that stem from laboratory discoveries. Recent highlights include the identification of a mitochondrial angiotensin system that changes with age. Importantly, interventions in older organisms with a commonly available anti-hypertensive agent that targets this system appear to positively impact both age-related mitochondrial and skeletal muscle dysfunction. He and his colleagues also recently published an inflammatory index that is highly predictive of adverse outcomes in older adults and that could be translated into clinical practice for risk assessment and intervention development.

Dr. Walston has co-authored more than 125 peer-reviewed publications, including publications in the New England Journal of Medicine, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, and the Journal of Gerontology. In addition to his role as the PI of the OAIC and several other NIH and foundation awards, he maintains an active clinical practice in Geriatric Medicine, co-directs the Biology of Healthy Aging Program at Johns Hopkins, and is Deputy Director of the Division of Geriatric Medicine and Gerontology at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine.