Abstract
Understanding the phenomenon of health is crucial for ageing research since there is often an implicit view on what constitutes health and how to measure it. We provide some reflections on how we might better understand and measure health, discuss the basic biological principles of survival, ageing, age-related diseases and eventual death, and end by tying these ideas together to rethink the nature of and implications for healthy ageing. We defend a more positive view on health understood in terms of various phenotypic parameters, such as robustness and resilience, and show how it relates to the aim to support these parameters over time to achieve healthy ageing. Together, these ideas suggest that the most effective strategies for healthy ageing may come from the outside-in by altering those aspects of the environment that prevent robust and resilient phenotypic responses and by supporting those aspects which ensure such responses.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
References
Boorse C (1997) A rebuttal on health. In: Humber JM, Almeder RF (eds) What is disease? Humana Press, Totowa, pp 3–134
Canguilhem G (1991) The normal and the pathological. Zone Books, New York
Cannon W (1929) Organisation for physiological homeostasis. Physiol Rev 9:399–431
de Grey ADNJ (2006) Forseeable pharmaceutical repair of age-related extracellular damage. Curr Drug Targets 7:1469–1477
Dubos R (1965) Man adapting. Yale University Press, New Haven
Huber M, Knottnerus JA, Green L, van der Horst H, Jadad AR, Kromhout D et al (2011) How should we define health? BMJ 343:d4163
Jensen UJ (1987) Practice and progress: a theory for the modern health-care system. Blackwell-Scientific, Oxford
Kingma E (2014) Naturalism about health and disease: adding nuance for progress. J Med Phil 39:590–608
Kirkwood TBL (2008) A systematic look at an old problem. Nature 451:644–647
Kitano H (2004) Biological robustness. Nature Genet 5:826–837
Kitano H (2007) Towards a theory of biological robustness. Mol Syst Biol 3:137
Kresser C (2017) Unconventional medicine, Lioncrest Publishing
Lemoine M (2015) The naturalisation of the concept of disease. In: Lambert G, Silberstein M, Huneman P (eds) Classification, disease and evidence: new essays in the philosophy of medicine. Springer, Amsterdam, pp 19–41
Lenart P, Bienertova-Vasku J (2017) Keeping up with the red queen: the pace of aging as an adaptation. Biogerontology 18:693–709
Marmot M (2015) The heath gap: the challenge of an unequal world. Bloomsbury, London
Martin GM (2002) Keynote: mechanisms of senescence—complificationists versus simplificationists. Mech Ageing Dev 123:65–73
McEwen BS, Wingfield JC (2003) The concept of allostasis in biology and biomedicine. Horm Behav 43:2–15
Odling-Smee FJ (2003) Niceh construction: the neglected process in evolution. Princeton University Press, Princeton
Rattan SIS (1995a) Ageing—a biological perspective. Mol Aspects Med 16:439–508
Rattan SIS (1995b) Gerontogenes: real or virtual? FASEB J 9:284–286
Rattan SIS (2006) Theories of biological aging: genes, proteins and free radicals. Free Rad Res 40:1230–1238
Rattan SIS (2007) Homeostasis, homeodynamics, and aging. In: Birren J (ed) Encyclopedia of gerontology. Elsevier Inc., UK, pp 696–699
Rattan SIS (2013) Healthy ageing, but what is health? Biogerontology 14:673–677
Rattan SIS (2015) Biology of ageing: principles, challenges and perspectives. Rom J Morphol Embryol 56:1251–1253
Rattan SIS (2016) Molecular and cellular basis of aging. In: Malavolta M, Mocchegiani E (eds) Molecular basis of nutrition and aging. Elsevier Academic Press, London, pp 3–9
Rattan SIS (2018) Biogerontology: research status, challenges and opportunities. Acta Biomed 89:291–301
Rose MR (1991) Evolutionary biology of aging. Oxford University Press, New York
Ryff CD, Singer BH (2009) Understanding healthy aging: key components and their integration. In: Bengston VL, Gans D, Putney N, Silverstein M (eds) Handbook of theories of aging. Springer, New York
Sagner M, McNeil A, Puska P, Auffray C, Price ND, Hood L et al (2017) The P4 health spectrum—a predictive, preventive, personalized and participatory continuum for promoting healthspan. Prog Cardiovasc Dis 59:506–521
Schroeder SA (2013) Rethinking health: healthier or healthier than? Br J Phil Sci 64:131–159
Schulkin J (2003) Rethinking homeostasis: allostatic regulation in physiology and pathophysiology. MIT Press, Cambridge
Sholl J (2016) Contextualizing medical norms: George Canguilhem’s surnaturalism. In: Giroux E (ed) Naturalism in the philosophy of health: issues and implications. Springer, Dordrecht, pp 81–100
Smirnova L, Harris G, Leist M, Hartung T (2015) Cellular resilience. Altex 32:247–260
Sterling P (2004) Principles of allostasis: optimal design, predictive regulation, pathophysiology and rational therapeutics. In: Schulkin J (ed) Allostasis, homeostasis, and cost of adaptation. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp 17–64
Truchetet ME, Pradeu T (2018) Rethinking our understanding of immunity: robustness in the tissue reconstruction system. Semin Immunol 26:45–55
Yates FE (1994) Order and complexity in dynamical systems: homeodynamics as a generalised mechanism in biology. Math Comput Modell 19:49–74
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2019 Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Sholl, J., Rattan, S.I.S. (2019). Biomarkers of Health and Healthy Ageing from the Outside-In. In: Moskalev, A. (eds) Biomarkers of Human Aging. Healthy Ageing and Longevity, vol 10. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-24970-0_4
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-24970-0_4
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-24969-4
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-24970-0
eBook Packages: Biomedical and Life SciencesBiomedical and Life Sciences (R0)