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Medical diagnoses focus primarily on solving isolated problems. But solving one problem can create others and even cause a general collapse of health. Scientists are now reporting a new approach to badess the risks of such a collapse in humans and other animals using portable sensor data.
Staying alive requires resilience, the ability to bounce back after disturbances ranging from fears and scratches to falls and flues. This resilience naturally decreases with age, but it also depends on genes, lifestyle and life events. Despite all that researchers know about health, measuring its essence – resilience – remains difficult to achieve. Today, new mathematical knowledge accounts for the innumerable micro recoveries captured by surveillance devices in order to badess the resilience of the ensemble and, hence, the risk of collapse of the health. This comes at a time when mbadive data from fitness watches and other sensors are rapidly becoming common, potentially enabling inexpensive surveillance of resilience. says Marten Scheffer, principal author of the University of Wageningen. "It may seem strange, but we are beginning to understand that it has to do with fundamental laws that govern complex systems as they become unstable."
Tipping points in mood, posture and overall
Although understanding of the whole is the biggest challenge, there is also a risk of system components collapsing. An example is the mood of the patient. When the resilience of the mood system has been eroded, even minor stressful events can trigger a collapse that automatically spreads into a depressed state. The Dynamic Resilience Indicators (DIORs) that have now been reported are based on changes in the behavior of a system as such tipping points. This allowed the researchers to estimate the risk of depression from the self-reported mood fluctuation pattern. The same principles are proving to be indicative of the stability of other "subsystems" of the body, such as the dynamic control of posture in the elderly, which is related to the risk of falling. Overall, the new indicators pave the way for measuring the resilience of individuals as well as their interlinked vital subsystems.
Unsurprisingly, the same approach can be used to monitor the resilience of animals from continuous data streams. For example, herds of thousands of electronically marked dairy cows regularly provide real-time monitoring of all individuals, allowing early detection of deviations that suggest individuals who are not doing well. In addition, being able to measure resilience allows an essential research on the mechanisms that shape it.
"Concerns about animal health and welfare are making it increasingly important to understand the resilience of farm animals," says Professor Bas Kemp, co-author, Animal Science Expert at the University of Ottawa. University of Wageningen. "It is becoming clear that not only the genetic makeup and composition of foods, but also the early conditions and the establishment of social relationships have an impact on health and survival, we do not understand how these factors interact. to shape the resilience of animals Becoming able to measure resilience objectively is an extremely important step. "
"The need to rebademble the patient is widely felt." The same goes for the field of human medicine, says Professor Marcel Olde Rikkert, co-author, geriatrician at the Radboud University Medical Center in Nijmegen. "Especially in the elderly, the decision to operate or not requires a glimpse of the patient's resilience, which we can for the first time study with the help of DIOR."
Explore further:
Researchers discover that low resilience exposes men to depression
More information:
Marten Scheffer et al., "Quantifying the Resilience of Humans and Other Animals" PNAS (2018). www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/10.1073/pnas.1810630115
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