Declining Resilience as a Manifestation of Aging

Resilience, meaning the ability to recover from wounds, infection, and other forms of damage, is more or less the flip side of frailty in aging. Frailty increases, resilience decreases. A damaged system is less robustly resilient to further damage, as reliability theory tells us. Degenerative aging is precisely an accumulation of cell and tissue damage at the molecular level, followed by all the myriad downstream dysfunctions and breakages caused by that damage. When we approach the treatment of aging, the guiding principle should be a focus on root cause damage and repair of that damage. Decline in biological resilience (ability to bounce back and recover) is a key manifestation of aging that contributes to increase in vulnerability to death with age, limiting longevity even in people without major diseases. Resilience is different from robustness which refers to the ability to avoid damage and its destructive consequences whatsoever. The robustness generally declines during aging; however, it may improve in some health domains, sometimes at the cost of resilience to future adverse events. We propose that aging can be viewed as a combination of three universal components: (i) depletion of limited body reserves (e.g., of stem cells, immune cells, muscle cells, neural cells, etc.), which poses limits to recovery; (ii) slowdown of physiological processes and responses to stress/damage, which delays the recovery with age; and (iii) inherently imperfect mechanisms...
Source: Fight Aging! - Category: Research Authors: Tags: Daily News Source Type: blogs