Purpose and Overview

Resilience, defined here as one’s ability to maintain or regain function after health stressors, is central to promoting successful aging and helping patients lead longer, healthier lives. As patients age, their biological capacity to bounce back from stressors deteriorates and exposure to health stressors increases. In this talk, Dr. Whitson describes a conceptual framework and methods for quantifying resilience. She will discuss how this framework is being used to develop novel biomarkers, test paradigms, and interventions to optimize late-life resilience to health challenges. Using the aging brain as one example, she will describe how the concept of age-related changes to resilience is being applied to a new research approach to Alzheimer's disease.