Professor Irene Rea
Professor Irene Maeve Rea combines her research and teaching interest in healthy ageing and inflammation with her work as a clinical consultant for the Belfast Health and Social Care Trust in Older People’s Medicine, in ongoing research and teaching collaborations with colleagues from her previous role in clinical medical academic research at Queens University Belfast and with colleagues in the University of Ulster in hervisiting professorship at Northern Ireland Centre for Stratified Medicine, C_TRIC. The main focus of Professor Rea’s research is investigating factors that may explain why approximately 10% of 90-year-olds age slowly, combining long ‘lifespan’ with ‘health span’ and often cluster in families.
In my research collaborations at Queens University Belfast, I set up the Belfast Elderly Longitudinal Study (BELFAST), (Wellcome Trust funded), that continues to investigate immunological, cardiovascular risk, genetic and life-style measures that may have contributed to good quality ageing in BELFAST nonagenarians. In a follow-on 11-country, EU-funded collaboration, Genetics of Healthy Ageing (GEHA study), the genetic and lifestyle data collected from 4500 nonagenarian, sibling pairs confirmed the APOE2 gene, and identified a chromosome-5-gene, and the mitochondrial-111-oxidation/redox gene complex, as new gene-related factors contributing to longevity. In non-genetic studies, GEHA researchers, and colleagues from Queens University and University of Ulster (C_TRIC) are part of a world-wide group which is investigating the role that chronic inflammation plays in the development of the chronic diseases, that compromise good quality ageing. A narrative review has also demonstrated the importance of optimism, resilience and good social networks in healthy ageing in GEHA nonagenarians.
Dr Irene Maeve Rea graduated in medicine at Queens University Belfast and during postgraduate clinical medical training obtained a visiting research scholarship to study at the Immunology, Histocompatibility and Immunogenetics laboratory at Stanford Medical School, following which she obtained MD in Neutrophil Function in Ageing. Professor Rea has lectured widely as an invited research speaker nationally and internationally and has contributed to undergraduate Medical training programmes at Harvard and in Taiwan. She continues to publish and peer review in wide range of age-related journals.
