Abstract
Resilience is the maintenance and/or quick recovery of mental health during and after periods of adversity. It is conceptualized to result from a dynamic process of successful adaptation to stressors. Up to now, a large number of resilience factors have been proposed, but the mechanisms underlying resilience are not yet understood. To shed light on the complex and time-varying processes of resilience that lead to a positive long-term outcome in the face of adversity, the Longitudinal Resilience Assessment (LORA) study has been established. In this study, 1191 healthy participants are followed up at 3- and 18-month intervals over a course of 4.5 years at two study centers in Germany. Baseline and 18-month visits entail multimodal phenotyping, including the assessment of mental health status, sociodemographic and lifestyle variables, resilience factors, life history, neuropsychological assessments (of proposed resilience mechanisms), and biomaterials (blood for genetic and epigenetic, stool for microbiome, and hair for cortisol analysis). At 3-monthly online assessments, subjects are monitored for subsequent exposure to stressors as well as mental health measures, which allows for a quantitative assessment of stressor-dependent changes in mental health as the main outcome. Descriptive analyses of mental health, number of stressors including major life events, daily hassles, perceived stress, and the ability to recover from stress are here presented for the baseline sample. The LORA study is unique in its design and will pave the way for a better understanding of resilience mechanisms in humans and for further development of interventions to successfully prevent stress-related disorder.
Highlights
Recent data from epidemiological surveys in the European Union show that each year, approximately 30% of the population suffer from a mental disorder, such as anxiety, depression, chronic pain, or addiction, that can at least to some
We recently suggested a conceptual framework for the study of resilience and made proposals for outcome variables
In the simplest possible scenario, we suggested to relate the change in mental health problems (P), measured at two time points ( TA and T B), to the individual cumulative stressor load experienced between TA and T B
Summary
Recent data from epidemiological surveys in the European Union show that each year, approximately 30% of the population suffer from a mental disorder, such as anxiety, depression, chronic pain, or addiction, that can at least to some. Emotion regulation, coping, or problem solving are similar concepts and more distal factors such as social support, life history, or genotype may affect resilience by shaping the way an individual regulates his/her emotions or copes with stressors [2] This calls for the identification and understanding of mediating mechanisms (‘resilience mechanisms’), i.e., a presumably smaller number of shared cognitive, physiological and/or neural pathways, that provide protection against stress-related impairments. Repeated quantitative assessments of encountered modern-life stressors, including critical life events and daily hassles, as well as stressor-dependent changes in mental health (via interim online stressor monitoring) and biosamples (hair cortisol and microbiome), are assessed every 3 months to investigate resilience outcomes over time (see Fig. 1). Each token is worth 5€ and is exchanged against a monetary compensation
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