Simple Assessments of Resilience as Potential Biomarkers of Aging

The search for low-cost, reliable measures of biological age continues apace in the research community. The more the better. Even if an individual measure is only loosely correlated, or produces fairly fuzzy, variable data, it may be still be possible to build an algorithm that combines many such different measures into a more accurate overall biomarker of aging. Given such a biomarker, the research community could more rapidly explore and assess potential rejuvenation therapies, and progress in the field of longevity science would accelerate as a result. Physical resilience is the ability of an organism to respond to physical stress, specifically, stress that acutely disrupts normal physiological homeostasis. It is the ability to quickly resolve these unexpected or unusual environmental, medical or clinical challenges that should be relevant to a better understanding of the underlying health status of the animal. By definition, resilience would be expected to decrease with increasing age, while frailty, defined as a decline in tissue function and measured by parameters such as walking speed, gait, and grip strength, increases with increasing age. The loss of resilience occurs earlier in life and so may be a causative factor in the development of frailty. Therefore, assessment of resilience could be a highly informative early paradigm to predict absence of biological dysfunction, i.e. healthy aging, compared to frailty, which only measures late life dysfunction. ...
Source: Fight Aging! - Category: Research Authors: Tags: Daily News Source Type: blogs