Stress Resilience and Healthy Aging – A Multidimensional Approach

• Applicant: Annabell Coors, Ph.D.
• Subject Area: Biogerontology and Geriatric Medicine ; Biological Psychology and Cognitive Neuroscience ; Epidemiology and Medical Biometry/Statistics
• Term: since 2025
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 570228492

Today’s and tomorrow’s societies are majorly challenged by an increasingly aging population, putting health care systems to its limits. Concurrently, the rising prevalence of mental health sequelae resulting from increasingly frequent global disruptions (pandemics, wars, economic crises) poses a significant threat to societies’ mental health. Mental health is an important determinant and predictor of healthy aging. Thus, this project is placed at the cross-roads of mental health protection and healthy aging. Stress resilience is known to be a protective factor for mental health, but evidence for associations with age-related outcomes such as cognitive reserve and biological age is scarce. Firmly establishing this link is a prerequisite for developing preventive interventions to foster healthy aging, targeting the interaction between stress resilience and cognitive and biological mechanisms of healthy aging. Using a normative measure of stressor reactivity, the stress resilience of around 470,000 participants from the UK Biobank Study will be determined. In one part of this project, we will investigate whether stress resilience is associated with cognitive reserve. Cognitive reserve is a construct that describes the resistance to cognitive impairments in the presence of brain pathology. To measure cognitive reserve, I will relate cognitive performance to the brain’s health status as assessed by structural MRI measures. The hypothesis is that greater stress resilience is associated with greater cognitive reserve. In parallel, I will investigate whether stress resilience is associated with two measures of biological age, namely phenotypic age (PhenoAge) and the Klemera-Doubal method age (KDMAge). Measures of biological age attempt to capture the state of decline in the integrity of body systems that occurs with increasing age and try to predict mortality or functional capability. By relating an estimate of biological age to a person’s chronological age, it is possible to determine whether someone is experiencing accelerated aging, decelerated aging, or aging as expected. The hypothesis is that greater stress resilience is associated with decelerated aging. In both parts of the project, I will assess the pivotal influence of sex differences on the link between stress resilience and healthy aging. Overall, this project will provide starting points for the follow-up project focusing on putative causal interactions of healthy cognitive and biological aging including non-linear dynamics of healthy aging and stress resilience in a longitudinal approach as well as on the mechanistic links between stress resilience and health outcomes such as cognitive performance, depression, and dementia. The current proposal will already add important evidence for the influence of stress resilience on healthy aging.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants