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Sylvia Santosa

Scientific Series: January 23, 2025


Shared Destinies: How Obesity Echoes Aging

Obesity and aging are interconnected processes with striking biological parallels, each significantly influencing health outcomes. In this talk, the mechanisms through which obesity mirrors the effects of aging are explored, emphasizing how excess weight accelerates the aging process. In doing so, our speaker explored aging processes in childhood and adult onset obesity. Through this model, this lecture revealed how obesity not only increases disease burden and affects life expectancy and also demonstrated the origins of these changes from the cell to the whole body. The mechanisms leading to comorbidities in both obesity and aging are strikingly similar, underscoring the need to rethink our understanding and treatment approaches to obesity and aging.


At the end of this presentation, participants were able to:

  1. Identify at least 3 comorbidities of obesity that also occur with aging.

  2. List at least 3 overlapping biological mechanisms shared by obesity and aging.

  3. Describe 2 characteristics that shift in adipose tissue which promote aging.

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Sylvia Santosa, Ph.D., R.D. is a researcher and expert in the field of nutrition, obesity, and metabolic health. She is currently a full professor in the Department of Health, Kinesiology, and Applied Physiology at Concordia University and holds a Tier II Canada Research Chair in Clinical Nutrition. Dr. Santosa has dedicated her career to studying the intricate relationship between adipose tissue, obesity, and metabolic disorders. She has published numerous peer-reviewed articles in prestigious scientific journals, contributing valuable insights to the field including to how obesity advances ageing. Her work has not only advanced our understanding of how fat tissue function affects the risk of metabolic disease but is also paving the way for more targeted and personalized treatment approaches for obesity-related conditions. Dr. Santosa’s work is funded through grants from agencies including NSERC, HSF, CFDR, and CIHR.

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