Physical resilience - a key to Healthy Aging?

Due to advances in health care and improved living conditions, the older population is growing.

Apart from longer lives, this also means that the older population of today will live with and survive both chronic and acute diseases, therefore aging research needs to shift towards a focus on healthy aging and well-being. A key to healthy aging is coping with adverse events as they appear, to be resilient.

Physical resilience is ‘one’s ability to withstand or recover from functional decline after an acute or chronic health stressor’ and builds on the theoretical framework of Healthy Aging, as presented by the WHO. One such event could be hip fractures among older adults.

But who are the older individuals that manage to preserve their physical function and quality of life after a hip fracture and what characterizes them?

To answer this, the proposed project will identify physical resilience in the older population, based on older individuals’ ability to cope with and recover from a hip fracture in terms of physical function and health-related quality of life.

Further, it will explore what characterizes individuals with similar resilience patterns, to form different physical resilience profiles and how the different profiles are associated with adverse outcomes (such as hospital admissions, care dependence and mortality) over a long-term period.

Through access to the Aging and Health Cohort, a linkage of several nationwide Swedish registers, among them the clinical register RIKSHÖFT, I will be able to further develop the concept of physical resilience and identify and describe the individuals who manage to regain walking ability and health-related quality of life after a hip fracture.

This will help us understand more about how to improve the prognosis after a hip fracture, a major public health issue among older adults.