Resilience (clinical)
DEResilienz (klinisch)
In gerontology, physical resilience is your capacity to bounce back after an acute health hit. The hit could be an illness, surgery, fall, bereavement, or hospital stay. Whitson and colleagues (2016, J Gerontol A) framed it as distinct from frailty. Frailty captures your vulnerability before the stressor. Resilience captures your recovery after it. Two people with identical baseline function can recover very differently from the same insult. How do you measure it? You track gait speed, grip strength, daily-function (ADL) scores, or biomarkers over time after a defined stressor. The math uses mixed models or 'area-under-recovery-curve' methods. High resilience predicts lower death and nursing-home risk. Low resilience flags the people who would benefit most from prehabilitation and targeted rehab.
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Sources
- Whitson HE, Duan-Porter W, Schmader KE, et al.. (2016). Physical Resilience in Older Adults: Systematic Review and Development of an Emerging Construct. *The Journals of Gerontology: Series A*doi:10.1093/gerona/glv202
- Varadhan R, Walston JD, Bandeen-Roche K. (2018). Can a Link Be Found Between Physical Resilience and Frailty in Older Adults by Studying Dynamical Systems?. *Journal of the American Geriatrics Society*doi:10.1111/jgs.15409
- Whitson HE, Cohen HJ, Schmader KE, et al.. (2018). Physical Resilience: Not Simply the Opposite of Frailty. *Journal of the American Geriatrics Society*doi:10.1111/jgs.15233