Holly Elser

It's something that I ask about in every new patient visit and something that I often check in on at follow-up visits.

Dr. Holly Elser is an assistant professor of neurology at the University of Pennsylvania.

We also like to refer to her as The Age of Aging's resident epidemiologist.

You might remember her from our episode on pollution, Polluted Minds.

She died of uterine cancer, and that was why I came back from England.

So, uh, it was navigating around that, trying to find ways to, uh, grieve and still focus on moving forward.

So while social isolation and loneliness impact many older adults and have a clear negative impact on our health, Dr. Holly Elser said that addressing these factors is not so straightforward.

You think about these, you know, lancet risk factors, and some of them you can imagine like a pretty uniform intervention at the population level, like for high blood pressure, we're just going to give people antihypertensives probably.