Resilience (clinical)

In gerontology, physical resilience is operationally defined as the capacity to recover or maintain physical function after an acute health stressor - illness, surgery, fall, bereavement, or hospitalisation. Whitson and colleagues (2016, J Gerontol A) proposed it as a distinct construct from frailty: frailty captures pre-stressor vulnerability, whereas resilience captures the post-stressor recovery trajectory. Two people with identical baseline function can show very different recovery slopes after the same insult. Resilience is quantified by tracking gait speed, grip strength, ADL scores, or biomarkers over time after a defined stressor, typically with linear mixed models or area-under-recovery-curve approaches. High resilience predicts lower mortality and institutionalisation; low resilience identifies people who will benefit most from prehabilitation and targeted rehabilitation interventions.