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Review
. 2025 Jul 1:6:1520842.
doi: 10.3389/fragi.2025.1520842. eCollection 2025.

From frailty to resilience: exploring adaptive capacity and reserve in older adults-a narrative review

Caglar Cosarderelioglu  1 , Jeremy D Walston  1 , Peter M Abadir  1
Affiliations
Review

From frailty to resilience: exploring adaptive capacity and reserve in older adults-a narrative review

Caglar Cosarderelioglu et al. Front Aging. .

Abstract

Resilience, the capacity to adapt and recover from adversity, plays a critical role in the health and wellbeing of older adults. In geriatric populations, resilience encompasses physical, cognitive, and psychosocial domains and is essential for maintaining functional independence and quality of life amidst the challenges of aging. This review explores the concept of resilience within geriatric medicine across physical, cognitive, and psychosocial domains, highlights the differences from frailty and reserve, underscores importance of stressors, summarizes key biomarkers that predict resilience, and evaluates interventions designed to enhance resilience in older adults.

Keywords: Alzheimer’s disease; Reserve; cognitive resilience; disability; frailty; older adults; physical resilience; psychosocial resilience.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Figures

FIGURE 1
FIGURE 1
Illustration of Resilience. The biological underpinnings of resilience, including molecular, cellular, and systems biology represented by the tree’s trunk. Social and environmental factors are depicted as the soil. Resilience outcomes across cognitive, physical, and psychological domains are symbolized by the branches of the tree. Figure reused from reference (Colón-Emeric et al., 2025).
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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