-
Views
-
Cite
Cite
Nathan K. LeBrasseur, Physical Resilience: Opportunities and Challenges in Translation, The Journals of Gerontology: Series A, Volume 72, Issue 7, July 2017, Pages 978–979, https://doi.org/10.1093/gerona/glx028
Close - Share Icon Share
Extract
The capacity of an organism to resist and respond to a challenge, or its resilience, has emerged as a construct of considerable interest to the field of geroscience. Indeed, aging is associated with an increased vulnerability to diverse physical, psychological, and social challenges. A plausible hypothesis is that compromised resilience is an early manifestation of aging, evident before overt static signals of impaired organ function or chronic disease (1) (Figure 1). As such, measures of resilience could serve as predictors of future health and life span, and surrogate endpoints in clinical trials of interventions that target the fundamental biology of aging.
In this issue of the Journal of Gerontology, Hadley, Kuchel, and Newman provide a summary of the National Institute on Aging (NIA) Workshop on Measures of Physiologic Resiliencies in Human Aging (2). The authors nicely highlight research priorities and inherent challenges to better understand physical resilience, defined as the ability to resist or recover from functional decline following a health stressor (3), such as infection, surgery, fracture, bed rest, or chemotherapy. Gaps in the understanding of physical resilience exist across the across the translational continuum—from biology to epidemiology—that can be best filled through multidisciplinary approaches. Notable examples include:
