Geriatrics Research: From Bench-to-Bedside

PROJECT SUMMARY/ABSTRACT Resilience, defined as the ability to respond to stressors, declines with age and co-morbid conditions in older organisms. To date, little progress has been made to improve our understanding of resilience with aging and its multi-component dimensions in response to physical, cognitive, and social stressors, in part because resilience itself is likely a dynamic multi-systemic process that is most evident under conditions of stress. This application is for a five-year cooperative conference grant to continue the successful “Geriatrics Research: Bench-to-Bedside” series. The series has had an outstanding impact. Past conferences represented “paradigm-shifting” moments and “pivotal” junctures in areas such as frailty, multimorbidity, and delirium. Here we propose to build bridges and bring together resilience scientists and experts from the physical, cognitive, and social domains to discuss, debate, and learn from each other the dynamic multi-component phenomena of resilience. In the first conference, Overview of the Resilience World: State of the Science, we will focus on setting the stage and discuss working definitions of resilience from physical, cognitive, and psychosocial fields. A goal will be to identify areas of commonalities and differences and how we can operationalize a shared concept so that “resilience” can be quantified appropriately in different contexts. In the second conference, Stress tests and Biomarkers of Resilience, we aim to discuss resilience stress test paradigms and molecular markers that may be associated with resilient outcomes. Building on the first conference, this conference will refer to operationalized definitions of resilience and resilient outcomes, acknowledging that definitions may differ slightly across fields and contexts. Lastly, the third conference is entitled Optimizing Resilience. By integrating the foundation built in the first two conferences, we will focus on interventions to optimize resilience in older adults. This conference series, once completed, will serve as a forum and a unifying thread that will bring together national research leaders to build an integrative multidimensional understanding of resilience in older organisms.