The National Institutes of Health has awarded USC a $7.5 million, five-year grant to create the USC Geroscience Specialized Center of Research Excellence on Sex Differences in Aging, known as GeroSCORE. The center will tackle a paradox researchers have documented for decades without fully explaining: women outlive men in nearly every country on earth, yet they carry a heavier burden of dementia, disability and other age-related conditions.
The funding comes from the National Institute on Aging in partnership with the NIH Office of Research on Women's Health. It marks USC's first NIH Specialized Center of Research Excellence and places the USC Leonard Davis School of Gerontology among the national leaders in this line of inquiry.
Rather than treating sex as a single biological variable, GeroSCORE is assembling researchers from aging biology, neuroscience, psychology, epidemiology, demography, sociology and data science. The goal is to trace how biological sex interacts with genetics, hormones, behavior and the social and physical environments people live in, and how those interactions shape aging across an entire lifespan.
For families dealing with dementia, this kind of work matters because roughly two-thirds of Alzheimer's patients are women, and prevention strategies built on a one-size-fits-all model may be leaving something on the table. The center's organizers frame the payoff broadly: better understanding of these differences could sharpen disease prevention, help people stay independent longer and extend healthy life for men and women alike.