Enhancing Healthy Aging: A Complex Systems Approach to Resilience

The Dutch population is aging, with projections indicating a 151% surge in individuals aged over 90 by 2040, compared to 2019. This demographic shift presents societal and clinical challenges, as older adults encounter common age-related adverse events, such as memory problems, hip fractures, and bereavement. The unique challenge lies in the fact that older adults frequently show surprising recoveries or worsen in unforeseen ways. Their functional decline is often not proportional to the burden of age-related events, making care demands complex and interventions uncertain.

In this lecture, I will discuss how a complexity-based perspective on resilience can help us to better understand the healthy aging process and inform interventions. I will depart from a complexity perspective on resilience applied in psychology, where resilience refers to the maintenance of healthy functioning despite facing adversity. Our viewpoint conceives of resilience an inherent property of how the entire mental health system of individuals is structured. I will discuss how we can estimate these mental health systems from empirical data, simulate the expected dynamics of these models, and, ultimately, generate stability landscapes. These landscapes provide insights into the stability of healthy and unhealthy states based on the estimated model, offering a comprehensive understanding of the individuals’ resilience to adversity.

In my IAS fellowship I aim to expand this approach to understand resilience in the aging process. Through interdisciplinary collaboration and empirical data from the ongoing Longitudinal Aging Study Amsterdam (LASA), I hope to, ultimately, advance the promotion of healthy aging.

Programme