Duration: 02:25mins
Transcript
My name's Danielle, I'm studying for a PhD in musculoskeletal ageing, that's in the School of Sport, Exercise and Rehabilitation Sciences, here at the University of Birmingham.
I'm researching sarcopenia, so the loss of skeletal muscle mass and function as we get older. Specifically I'm looking at lifestyle interventions, so protein intake and resistance exercise to try and prevent this loss and I'm looking at the timing and the distribution of protein through the day to see if that has any effect.
I chose Birmingham for a number of reasons really. I mean firstly the course was right, that was the most important thing. It was what I wanted to do. But then we've also got the Centre for Musculoskeletal Ageing Research, so that's a Centre specifically set up to do this kind of research, so that means I've got that support behind me, I've got a network of other researchers working in this area to communicate with.
And you've also got the location is very good for me as well; the transport links are brilliant. I mean we've got the train station five minutes away. So all of that kind of made it the perfect choice for me really.
I'm funded for my PhD by the Centre for Musculoskeletal Ageing Research, so that provides me with tuition fees and then also a stipend to live off and then there's certainly amount of money that covers my running costs, you know, allows me to go to conferences. For example, I went to the European College of Sports Science conference in Amsterdam last year and I actually had a poster there.
I think my favourite thing about being a postgraduate researcher at Birmingham has been the people. So the times when I actually get to go out and I meet my participants and so on and basically just have a chat with them. So I start off talking about my research, you know, introducing the study that I'm asking them to do and then we'll often just end up sitting having a chat for a while after that. So I think those are definitely my favourite parts.
Research into musculoskeletal ageing in health, it's so important because we know that the number of older people in our population, we know it's increasing, we know the proportion of older people in our population is increasing as well, so any problems that affect those people they are of growing importance. They should be important to all of us.
So the kind of research that we do, it looks into lifestyle interventions but all other kind of interventions as well, to help promote musculoskeletal health which can kind of push people either way around the threshold of independence. So this is the difference between people being able to live independently, live a full life in their own homes, rather than people who perhaps need a little more help just with day to day activities.
So this kind of research that we're doing, this can help kind of keep people in their own homes, keep people living independently and more importantly, keep that quality of life.
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