Quantifying resilience of humans and other animals

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Abstract

All life requires the capacity to recover from challenges that are as inevitable as they are unpredictable. Understanding this resilience is essential for managing the health of humans and their livestock. It has long been difficult to quantify resilience directly, forcing practitioners to rely on indirect static indicators of health. However, measurements from wearable electronics and other sources now allow us to analyze the dynamics of physiology and behavior with unsurpassed resolution. The resulting flood of data coincides with the emergence of novel analytical tools for estimating resilience from the pattern of microrecoveries observed in natural time series. Such dynamic indicators of resilience may be used to monitor the risk of systemic failure across systems ranging from organs to entire organisms. These tools invite a fundamental rethinking of our approach to the adaptive management of health and resilience.

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Poverty impedes cognitive function.

Anandi Mani, Sendhil Mullainathan, Eldar Shafir … (2013)

The poor often behave in less capable ways, which can further perpetuate poverty. We hypothesize that poverty directly impedes cognitive function and present two studies that test this hypothesis. First, we experimentally induced thoughts about finances and found that this reduces cognitive performance among poor but not in well-off participants. Second, we examined the cognitive function of farmers over the planting cycle. We found that the same farmer shows diminished cognitive performance before harvest, when poor, as compared with after harvest, when rich. This cannot be explained by differences in time available, nutrition, or work effort. Nor can it be explained with stress: Although farmers do show more stress before harvest, that does not account for diminished cognitive performance. Instead, it appears that poverty itself reduces cognitive capacity. We suggest that this is because poverty-related concerns consume mental resources, leaving less for other tasks. These data provide a previously unexamined perspective and help explain a spectrum of behaviors among the poor. We discuss some implications for poverty policy.

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Caloric restriction improves health and survival of rhesus monkeys

Julie A. Mattison, Ricki Colman, T. Beasley … (2017)

Caloric restriction (CR) without malnutrition extends lifespan and delays the onset of age-related disorders in most species but its impact in nonhuman primates has been controversial. In the late 1980s two parallel studies were initiated to determine the effect of CR in rhesus monkeys. The University of Wisconsin study reported a significant positive impact of CR on survival, but the National Institute on Aging study detected no significant survival effect. Here we present a direct comparison of longitudinal data from both studies including survival, bodyweight, food intake, fasting glucose levels and age-related morbidity. We describe differences in study design that could contribute to differences in outcomes, and we report species specificity in the impact of CR in terms of optimal onset and diet. Taken together these data confirm that health benefits of CR are conserved in monkeys and suggest that CR mechanisms are likely translatable to human health.

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Rising variance: a leading indicator of ecological transition.

S. R. Carpenter, W. Brock (2006)

Regime shifts are substantial, long-lasting reorganizations of complex systems, such as ecosystems. Large ecosystem changes such as eutrophication, shifts among vegetation types, degradation of coral reefs and regional climate change often come as surprises because we lack leading indicators for regime shifts. Increases in variability of ecosystems have been suggested to foreshadow ecological regime shifts. However, it may be difficult to discern variability due to impending regime shift from that of exogenous drivers that affect the ecosystem. We addressed this problem using a model of lake eutrophication. Lakes are subject to fluctuations in recycling associated with regime shifts, as well as fluctuating nutrient inputs. Despite the complications of noisy inputs, increasing variability of lake-water phosphorus was discernible prior to the shift to eutrophic conditions. Simulations show that rising standard deviation (SD) could signal impending shifts about a decade in advance. The rising SD was detected by studying variability around predictions of a simple time-series model, and did not depend on detailed knowledge of the actual ecosystem dynamics.

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Journal

Journal ID (nlm-ta): Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A

Journal ID (iso-abbrev): Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A

Journal ID (hwp): pnas

Journal ID (pmc): pnas

Journal ID (publisher-id): PNAS

Title: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America

Publisher: National Academy of Sciences

ISSN (Print): 0027-8424

ISSN (Electronic): 1091-6490

Publication date (Print): 20 November 2018

Publication date (Electronic): 29 October 2018

Publication date PMC-release: 29 October 2018

Volume: 115

Issue: 47

Pages: 11883-11890

Affiliations

[1] ^aEnvironmental Sciences Group, Wageningen University , 6708 PB Wageningen, The Netherlands;

[2] ^bAdaptation Physiology Group, Wageningen University , 6708 PB Wageningen, The Netherlands;

[3] ^cDepartment of Psychology, University of Amsterdam , 1018 WX Amsterdam, The Netherlands;

[4] ^dEmory Critical Care Center, Emory University , Atlanta, GA 30322;

[5] ^eDepartment of Geriatrics, Radboud Institute for Health Sciences, Radboud University Medical Center , 6525 GA Nijmegen, The Netherlands;

[6] ^fSchool of Life Sciences, University of Sussex , Brighton BN1 9RH, United Kingdom;

[7] ^gLaboratory of Nematology, Wageningen University , 6708 PB Wageningen, The Netherlands;

[8] ^hDepartment of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Princeton University , Princeton, NJ 08544;

[9] ⁱDepartment of Medicine, Monash Health Community, Clayton, VIC 3168, Australia;

[10] ^jDepartment of Biology, Tufts University , Medford, MA 02155

Author notes

¹To whom correspondence should be addressed. Email: Marten.Scheffer@ 123456wur.nl .

Edited by B. L. Turner, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ, and approved October 4, 2018 (received for review June 24, 2018)

Author contributions: M.S. designed research; and M.S., J.E.B., D.B., T.G.B., S.M.W.G., D.G., J.E.K., B.K., I.A.v.d.L., S.L., C.M.M., R.J.F.M., E.H.v.N., L.M.R., and M.G.M.O.R. wrote the paper.

Article

Publisher ID: 201810630

DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1810630115

PMC ID: 6255191

PubMed ID: 30373844

SO-VID: 22a1b70c-7713-41ce-a7c8-e9516426ae18

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This open access article is distributed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License 4.0 (CC BY-NC-ND).

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Quantifying resilience of humans and other animals

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Horses and Humans Research Foundation

Most cited references 79

Poverty impedes cognitive function.

Caloric restriction improves health and survival of rhesus monkeys

Rising variance: a leading indicator of ecological transition.

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