Abstract
The term resilience, which has been present in science for almost half a century, stands for the capacity of some system needed to overcome an amount of disturbance from the environment in order to avoid a change to another stable state. In medicine, the concept of resilience means the ability to deal with daily stress and disturbance to our homeostasis with the intention of protecting it from disturbance. With aging, the organism becomes more sensitive to environmental impacts and more susceptible to changes. Mental disturbances and a decline in psychological resilience in older people are potentiated with many social and environmental factors along with a subjective perception of decreasing health. Distinct from findings in younger age groups, mental and physical medical conditions in older people are closely associated with each other, sharing common mechanisms and potentiating each other’s development. Increased inflammation and oxidative stress have been recognized as the main driving mechanisms in the development of aging diseases. This paper aims to reveal, through a translational approach, physiological and molecular mechanisms of emotional distress and low psychological resilience in older individuals as driving mechanisms for the accelerated development of chronic aging diseases, and to systematize the available information sources on strategies for mitigation of low resilience in order to prevent chronic diseases.
Highlights
Definition of the Term Resilience and in Particular Resilience in PsychologyThe term resilience has been used in various contexts and across a range of disciplines, including engineering, ecology, economics, life sciences, psychology and psychiatry, to describe the plasticity and adaptability of complex dynamic systems to adverse circumstances [1]
Autophagy, cell survival and Emerging approaches in measuring age-related resilience include measuring how quickly and completely an individual recovers from acute stress, such as a hip fracture. This can be accomplished by modeling composite resilience measures from longitudinal human data; this is the case with the physiological dysregulation index (PD), which integrates deviations of multiple biomarkers from their baseline/normal physiological states into one estimate reflecting the loss of homeostasis in biological networks or longitudinal analysis of blood markers [46,47,48]
This review presents the basis for a better and more comprehensive understanding of the phenomenon termed resilience, and its health-related importance, for an older part of the population
Summary
The well-known description of the physiological response to acute stress, as pioneered by the physiologist Seyle a half of century ago, is based on activation of the HPA axis and its regulation by the negative feed-back loop. Americans, who, over the life course, are exposed to inequalities in employment, income, and education opportunities, were found to suffer lower rates of major mental disorders, disproportionate to the higher levels of psychological distress they suffer; on the contrary, this racial group exhibits higher rates of chronic diseases in middle age and later life, and have, lower average life expectancy [12] Coping strategies that this racial group may practice to reduce stress-related anxiety and tension, such as smoking, drinking alcohol, or use of psychotropic drugs, together with eating foods high in fat and carbohydrates, which is usually a characteristic of poverty, may impose a cost on physical health in later life by developing pathophysiological changes associated with an unhealthy lifestyle
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Free) 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call
